Review of The Grey Zone (2001) by Mia S — 18 May 2008

Stanley Kubrick said of dekalog that this was the only masterpiece he had seen in his lifetime - well for me this film is in that zone. It is only for survivors of the holocaust or those involved to say how what that reality may have been like to experience, and for anyone else interested (which you would hope would be anyone else) it is hard to imagine any better indicator than a film like this.

There are elements of the usual insufficiency to connect with the victims, some jingoism and excessive emotionality associated with dramatic depictions, but this film has a visceral humanist thread, managing to place all victims of the horror on the same level - the doctor who seizes survival by collaborating with the infamous Dr.

Mengele and so enjoys priveleges only given to a handful in the camp, the enslaved who work the nazi machinery of death and heriocally seek to destroy that machinery, and the lowest: the powerless victims, the "cargo", who arrive on death-trains to be welcomed by music played by enslaved fellow jews , to be given false comfort by more enslaved fellow jews, before being delivered to the unimaginable doom of the gas-chambers.

Somehow this film manages to escape what has become an established film cliche of the screaming masses in the gas chamber - here we are given so many different perspectives of the same doom that we cannot escape the lesson that people died in this way.

It actually happenned and this film is just a reminder. Whatever the story of the protagonists of this film, and the romanticism of the little girl's rescue, this film is a crossbow bolt through any heart that has not felt the pain of the Jewish holocaust of WW2.

As such is it art of the highest order.