KZ

Disturbed by the sight of tourists enjoying steins of beer and an oompah band just steps away from the death camp of Mauthausen in Austria, director Rex Bloomstein embarked on this extraordinary and groundbreaking documentary. KZ exposes everyday life in this picturesque Danube valley town that must always live under--or perhaps try to forget--the shadow cast by the concentration camp in its midst. KZ is radical for a Holocaust documentary--and very important. Using no archival footage, no historical photographs, no interviews with scholars, no music and no re-creations, Bloomstein instead focuses on the right now of the town. He brings his impartial camera into the homes of today’s Mauthausen residents, those who remember its past and those who prefer to overlook it. And he enters the lives of the tour guides at the concentration camp ("KZ" in German), who must bear the daily burden of relating to visitors--some bored, some uninformed, some overwrought--the atrocities that took the lives of tens of thousands of prisoners. As viewers, we become a kind of second-tier tourist as Bloomstein (Auschwitz and the Allies, SFJFF 1984) invites us along on a disquieting, powerful excursion that reveals, in the present tense, so much about how we treat the past.