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KZ

When the story of the unspeakable has been told a thousand times, when the images of the unimaginable have been shown a thousand times, when the mind is numb – where do you go from there? You have to start anew…

That is where this film begins.

On the banks of the river Danube, surrounded by the beautiful landscape of Upper Austria, lies the picturesque town of Mauthausen. Two kilometers from its town centre is a place that attracts bikers, busloads of tourists, parties of schoolchildren, people from all over the world. Tour guides come to work here every day, while nearby the locals go about their daily lives. This is a place where thousands upon thousands of people from over 30 nations were tortured and murdered. This site is the former KZ, German short for concentration camp. How does it feel to be a tourist at a former concentration camp?

How does it feel to work here as a guide, day in day out? How does it feel to live here as a local with the dark secrets of the past? And what of those who’ve chosen this town to be their new home?

This is a groundbreaking film about facing our ultimate demons. It is a contemporary yet timeless piece on the horrors that we have and always will be able to inflict on one another.

Stripped of the usual dramatic devices, survivor testimonies and archive footage this radical film shows nothing but says everything.

It will shake you to the core.

REVIEWS

“In its deceptively calm way, KZ is the year’s most fascinating documentary.”

– THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY0

“KZ…is an outstanding documentary.”

– THE OBSERVER

“…it raises issues of remembrance, and forgetting in a steadily unsettling, powerfully understated way.”

– THE TIMES, 4 stars

“Rex Bloomstein achieves the impressive feat of not merely memorialising the Holocaust, but probing the complex, discomfiting hold it continues to have on the now.”

– TIME OUT, 4 stars

“If it weren’t true you simply wouldn’t believe it…an impressively calm documentary.”

– EVENING STANDARD, 4 stars
“Rex Bloomstein’s powerful documentary about the WW2 Nazi Mauthausen concentration camp centres on guides taking tourists around the camp (there is no archive footage), and his stark account still chills to the bone.”
– THE DAILY STAR
“KZ ambitiously aims to create a radically different Holocaust film….. admirable work.”
– THE DAILY TELEGRAPH
“quietly electrifying…. KZ reinvigorates oft-told Holocaust atrocities by relaying them from neglected perspectives.”
– NEWSDAY
“Subtle and understated – but this only serves to make the film all the more unsettling.”
– SCREEN INTERNATIONAL
“Committed Brit docu-helmer Rex Bloomstein continues his career long engagement with … KZ … increasingly disturbing portrait of contempo guides and visitors at the Nazi concentration camp Mauthausen, and villagers in the Austrian town. Strong subject and unfussy execution … Tech package is pro … Overlapping sound subtly knits together disparate scenes to impressive fluency and narrative flow.”
– VARIETY
“Sublime … KZ becomes a fascinating study of the way minds work when confronted with the inconceivable.”
– SALT LAKE WEEKLY, 3 ½ stars: favourable
“KZ is a totally engrossing and extremely disturbing doc….a powerful message delivered in an intriguing way.”
– FILMTHREAT.COM, 4 stars: highly favourable
Critic’s Diary: “Rex Bloomstein’s powerfully restrained KZ makes a compelling case for not just the continued existence of the form itself, but the necessity of the concentration camp memorial experience.”
– INDIEWIRE
“KZ, perhaps the first postmodern Holocaust movie … explores the subject in a different way. … Bloomstein … was making a TV documentary called “Liberation” when he noticed the beer drinking and singing taking place within yards of the former concentration camp. He was ‘haunted by the disjunction, the reality of people enjoying themselves, and then the reality over there’ at the camp, and decided to make a film that would show ‘the interface of memory and history and the present’.”
– JEWISH JOURNAL