71st Berlinale: Festival’s Summer Special ends with homage to international solidarity
Mr Bachmann and His Class, directed by Maria Speth, is an impressive homage to international solidarity.
Mr. Bachmann and His Class
For three and a half hours, the film documents the way in which a dedicated teacher in a small industrial town in Hesse helps his pupils from many different countries feel at home and become citizens of the world.
An estimated 60,000 visitors attended the open-air screenings of the Berlinale’s Summer Special, which ended June 20. Some 8,500 visitors took part in the voting for the 2021 Berlinale Competition Audience Award.
Dokumentarfilme auf der Berlinale: Hommage an die Unsichtbaren - Kultur
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Foremost among the art films that premiered at the 2021 Berlin International Film Festival last week was
À Pas Aveugles (From Where They Stood) a documentary by the French film-maker Christophe Cognet that focuses on the photographs taken by prisoners in Nazi concentration camps and in the Birkenau death camp.
Cognet’s rigorously reconstructs the places where the pictures were shot in secret, identifies the people who took them, shows how they might have obtained and concealed cameras, and places the picture-taking in the wider context of Nazi forced labour and extermination.
Since the Germans destroyed many of the camps as Allied troops approached, part of Cognet’s project became an archaeology of vanished sites that are now highly groomed monuments. Like crime scene reconstructions, each of these landscapes frames a microhistory of horror, not least in Birkenau, where fragments of charred bones still rise from mass graves when it rains.
film profile], discovered in the Forum section of the 71st Berlinale, a meticulous and original investigation based on the very rare clandestine photographs taken by the deportees themselves (from the spring 1943 to the fall of 1944) at the risk of their lives, from within the camps.
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In conversations with historians specialised in the history of the Shoah, the director uncovers the story of each of these pictures, plunging at the heart of those images with a magnifying glass and placing them back as accurately as possible in the current reality of the remains of the Dachau, Mittelbau-Dora, Buchenwald, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Ravensbrück camps. Who took those pictures, and in what circumstances? Where did the camera come from? Who’s in the frame and what does it reveal? How was the film hidden and salvaged? So many questions which are explored methodically and patiently, by offering hypotheses (we do not know the exact circum
From Where They Stood shines a light on secretly taken photos to help us remember
From Where They Stood by Christophe Cognet
For some fifteen years now,
Christophe Cognet has been working on pictures taken in secret and at risk of death by deportees in Nazi camps. And after the drawings and watercolours of
Parce que j’étais peintre (revealed in the Cinema XXI section of Rome Film Fest 2013), it is these very photos which form the focus of Cognet’s second documentary feature
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In Dachau, Buchenwald, Mittelbau-Dora, Ravensbrück, and Auschwitz-Birkenau, a number of deportees managed to take clandestine photos of their surrounds. Given the great efforts that these women and men went to in order to pass these images on to us, we owe it to them to take a look, and this is the subject-matter explored by the filmmaker, which he has also set out in a book by the name of
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