Le Dernier Témoignage

I know this is the kind of piece of media, a historical document that has storytelling intertwined inextricably as I oral stories do have more power sometimes, that isn't really applicable tk star ratings, but I'll give it this anyway simply for the reasons that this director (who's grandparents died in the camps) has a strong sense in the editing of how to pace these interviews with the B roll of the camps and the cities surrounding them (for once a drone shot that has a thematic purpose), and what he gets in the interviews shows that he knows how to ask the right questions and make it about what they knew or are still in the deepest depths of denial. There are those who take full responsibility and there's a very interesting theme of jow culpability leads to guilt and what it means to be German today, and this is best highlighted in that conference room scene (at the same place where the Final Solution idea was put forward, January 20th 1942). There are also one or two chronic deniers and double talkers are confounding, and yet it speaks to how reckoning with one's national identity and one's own sense of self can be very muddy. And it's especially important now for Americans to watch a film like this as it speaks to our own countries past horrors (this last week with the Tulsa massacre at 100 years made that clear). Hard to watch but just as hard not to.