Photographs taken by Nazi camp prisoners remind us of the horrors of the Holocaust in new documentary at Berlin Film Festival
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. Si...