KZ

KZ was nominated for a Grand Jury Prize at this year's Sundance Film Festival.
How do people live with the ghosts of the past? How do you live your life knowing that, in the very recent past, atrocities were committed just kilometres from your home, possibly by people you know?
These are the questions posed in KZ, a harrowing documentary portrait of the picturesque town of Mauthausen, Austria, walking distance from the site of the last ‘KZ' (as the concentration camps were known) in operation at the end of World War II.
The documentary intercuts footage of groups touring the KZ site and interviews with Mauthausen residents, including a tour guide whose obsession with the camp has fuelled a descent into depression and alcoholism, a couple living in a house formally owned by an SS officer and elderly locals who recall their memories of the town in the final years of the war.

---

D/P Rex Bloomstein WS Films Transit L English, German, Czech, Turkish TD video/2005/98mins

Rex Bloomstein was born in London, UK, in 1942. He has worked extensively as a documentary filmmaker for the BBC. KZ (2005) is his first theatrical feature film.