The war is not over Fictional settlement of Landsdorf in Austria. Around a field and a forest, but somewhere here is a mass grave, in which 200 murdered Jews from a labor camp were buried in March 1945. As time passes, this tomb is treated as a half-forgotten legend, thinking that it will not be found. Everything, but not the main character of the film. Dr. Joel Halberstam, a senior researcher at the Institute for Holocaust Studies in Jerusalem, is suing local authorities who have already given permission for large-scale development of the territory, after which nothing can be dug under the asphalt layer. Yoel gets permission to examine classified documents - the last chance to find living witnesses to what happened, while the court still gives a brief reprieve.
Yoel, as a true historian, is a man at war. “I am confronting a time that can hide the facts,” he says in an interview with the German channel. Time is at war with man, erasing the sense of importance of old events. The problem of the grave for almost everyone is at best a matter of academic importance, or even a matter of days gone by. The authorities of Landsdorf want to go into the future, Joel’s sister believes that his brother ruined his life, and even his colleagues believe that more than a memorial museum and the official recognition of dozens of victims (instead of two hundred), can not be achieved.
But for Yoel as a religious Jew, the truth is absolute and only one, and it differs from today’s recognition by downplaying the number of victims by several times. Partial access to secret documents is like a dive into the depths of history, giving them several times more overview. Did Yoel think that at this depth, time would strike him back, revealing the truth about his mother?
At the level of the plot, the picture attracts both the personal drama of Yoel, rethinking his identity, and the search for living witnesses: out of a dozen who were buried, eight were killed, one strangely died on the way to court in the postwar period, and only one may be alive – the last thread of Yoel, which is still to be found in this historical tangle of mixed destinies and names.
And between the lines of dialogue in this film, you learn not about the past, but about the present. In a report on Yoel, a German TV reporter quietly mentions that Joel is known for denouncing the Holocaust denial position. As if this position is considered something normal and normal. And from someone who survived the war, Yoel hears: "The war is not over." They are the same people and we need to survive. It is not the twenty-first century, but the Third Reich.
“Evidence” is a film about the past and the present. The prototype of Landsdorf is a real Rechnitz near the Hungarian border, the events in which in 1945 generally correspond to the plot of the film, even the name of the Nazi (Podezin) is preserved. And in the summer of 2019, the remains of one of the Mauthausen branches were destroyed in Austria. But no memory museums, as in the film, on the site of mass murders and did not think to build.
8 out of 10
Original
