A Holocaust Documentary Interviews the Perpetrators
Luke Holland’s film “Final Account” makes a study of evasion, denial, and self-justification among living participants in Hitler’s Third Reich.
COURTESY OF FOCUS FEATURES
Margarete Schwarz worked for an SS family as a nanny for six years.
What atrocities a human being is capable of and the psychic torments she might or might not suffer in consequence are, to a disturbing degree, social questions. In Joshua Oppenheimer’s disorienting 2012 documentary,
The Act of Killing, a group of Indonesian gangsters reminisce in fond tones about the mass rape, torture, and murder they committed together in the mid-1960s, reenacting some favorite scenes for the camera. Swaggering, they dress each other up in candy-colored suits and hats like something out of
Final Account | Coming Soon | Movie Synopsis and info tribute.ca - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from tribute.ca Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
FINAL ACCOUNT MOVIE REVIEW
Director: Luke Holland
Opens: May 21, 2021
Turkey refuses to admit its role in the Armenian genocide of 1915, making it a crime to speak of that nation’s actions. At the same time Germany freely concedes its guilt in the Holocaust, has built one impressive memorial to Jews covering one square block in Berlin, has posters around a museum-like outdoor site of the perpetrators, and makes it a crime to deny the Holocaust. While Germany, which has given reparations to the families of Jews of lost their lives and property from the thirties to the mid-forties, individual Germans run the spectrum on the question of guilt. Editing down from a huge number of interviews to a ninety-four minutes of talking heads and a few archival shots from the Nazi era, writer-director Luke Holland, who was not aware of his own Jewish heritage until he was an adult, lays out his case, which boils down to this. 1) Some interviewees refuse to accept guilt because a) they had n
Was it the pandemic or are audiences sick and tired of gory games? Plus, Netflix s Army of the Dead gamble pays off and more from the weekend box office of May 14-16, 2021.
Final Account
Luke Holland and I had a regular spot at St. Pancras railway station in London. We would sit under the vaulted 30-foot Victorian ceilings, sipping afternoon tea and discussing the latest Nazis he had interviewed.
Holland, who was born in England in 1948 and died of cancer last spring, was raised in Paraguay, where his family moved when he was four years old. It was a happy childhood, full of expats. He grew up speaking English, German, and Spanish. It was only when the family returned to the United Kingdom in Luke’s teenage years that he learned his mother was Jewish, a refugee from Vienna whose family was killed in the Holocaust. He soon realized that many of those German-speaking neighbors in Paraguay were resettled Nazis.