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VENICE 2005 Critics’ Week

The hidden memory of Belzec

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Closing last night at the 20th edition of Critics’ Week at la Mostra with the screening in "special event" of the documentary Belzec by Frenchman Guillaume Moscovitz.

Set in Poland, not far from the Ukrainian border, the town of Belzec had a Nazi extermination camp from March 1942 through to the early months of 1943 and more than 800 000 Jews were killed there. Soviet troops arrived, the camp was totally dismantled, the bodies buried and burned, trees planted to hide all traces.

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Building his work around direct and indirect witnesses, inhabitants Belzec, Guillaume Moscovitz concentrates on the dramatic repercussions of the memories of each of them. These very rigorous interviews include notably children who watched the trains full of deportees and a worker who helped build the camp, archaeologists reconstructing the lay-out of the buildings and the depths of the common ditches and a survivor who was six at the time and hid for 20 months in a wood-pile. Belzec gives voice also to those who kept their mouths shut out of fear during the war and out of guilt after it. Using, too, some archival letters, the documentary confronts the terrible numbers of people killed in such a short time period, for the inhabitants of the town a nightmare period beyond understanding. Walking slowly with his camera in the green countryside, Guillaume Moscovitz allows this hidden memory of Belzec to flow past. He also gives a contemporary dimension to the degree of horror of such a recent historical event which the filmmaker Samuel Fuller (as a soldier in the American army he discovered the concentration camps) classified as impossible to understand with the mind.

Produced by Jean Bigot for VLR, Belzec obtained Advance on Receipts of 160 000 euros from National Film Centre (CNC). Sold internationally by Films Distribution, it will be released in French cinemas on the 2nd November.

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(Translated from French)

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