Passenger

On a liner returning to Europe, a German woman sees another woman's face and the past comes up. She tells her husband she was an overseer at Auschwitz during the war, and that she saved a woman's life. The film's subject is precisely that account: who is telling what to whom, and what is being left out. The source is the work of Zofia Posmysz, who survived Auschwitz. Arrested at eighteen while distributing leaflets in Krakow, she spent two and a half years in Auschwitz-Birkenau and was then sent to Ravensbrück. The radio play she wrote in 1959 is told from the perspective of her own guard; she turned it into a novel in 1962. Andrzej Munk was killed in a car crash during production at thirty-nine. His friend Witold Lesiewicz and their colleagues completed the film with what existed. The shipboard sections are built from stills and voice-over, the Auschwitz scenes from footage Munk shot. That enforced form became the film's greatest strength: its incompleteness matches the workings of memory. Who it's for: Viewers interested in Holocaust cinema, in memory and testimony, and in war films with considered form. Who it's not for: The film is unfinished and does not hide it, which makes it fragmented and difficult if you want a whole narrative.