Actor, writer, and director Tim Blake Nelson adapts this grim look at the Holocaust from his own play, based on Miklós Nyiszli's book, Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account. The film centers on the Sonderkommando: Jewish concentration camp prisoners whose job was to herd their fellow Jews into the gas chamber, and to dispose of the bodies following the execution. In return, these prisoners received food and a little more time before their own executions. As the members of the sonderkommando
struggle to orchestrate what would be the only armed insurrection in Auschwitz, a group of them discover a 14-year-old girl who somehow survived the gas chamber. The girl becomes a symbol for their own spiritual salvation and they become obsessed with keeping the girl alive, even if it endangers the uprising that could save thousands. This film was screened at the 2001 Toronto Film Festival. ~ Jonathan Crow, Rovi
Unlike Schindler's List, ... this uses history to remind us of the tenuousness of our own morality, to remind us that ... most of us will never have to know what we might be capable of in certain circumstances.
It's hard to imagine anybody ever being "in the mood" to view a movie as harrowing and painful as The Grey Zone, but it's equally hard to imagine anybody being able to tear their eyes away from the screen once it's started.
Russell Lee Fine's handheld camera presses you repeatedly too close to the characters' perpetual fatigue and resilience, their pains to survive when they cannot.
If stars could be awarded on the basis of good intentions, The Grey Zone should be king of the galaxy. Unfortunately, it lands on earth with something of a thud.
A group of Hungarian jews who work in a death camp plan an uprising to destroy the crematorium when it becomes clear that they are next on the death list. Based upon an eye witness account, The Grey Zone is a harrowing story of life in a concentration camp where all human morality is abandoned in the attempt to stay
alive. The characters are all regular people who are forced to choose between collaboration and death and in turn have to live with the consequences of their actions and it makes you wonder what you would do if you were in the same position. Great performances all round (Harvey Keitel's Hogan's Heroes accent notwithstanding) make for an intelligent and affecting story that maybe is not on a level with Schindler's List or Downfall, but it's still a powerful and thought provoking film about what happens when human life loses all value. Grim but in good way.
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