JIFF26 Block 10

This unflinching drama lays bare the brutality of Auschwitz and the harrowing medical experiments that took place within its walls, told through the story of a Jewish inmate who is forced into complicity. It’s 1943, and over 400 Jewish women are imprisoned in Auschwitz’s Block 10, an isolated section where Nazi doctor Carl Clauberg tests painful methods of forced sterilization. When Jewish gynaecologist Dr. Maximilian Samuel arrives at the camp, he is blackmailed with the gassing of his 20-year-old daughter if he refuses to participate in the brutal experiments. Trapped in a moral dilemma, he seeks his own path. With immense sensitivity – and glimmers of humanity – director Marcus O Rosenmüller and screenwriter Alice Brauner (a consultant at the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation) use existing court records and survivor testimony as the basis of this account which sheds new light on the horrors of Auschwitz. Each session will be preceded by a video introduction from Dr Simon Holloway from the Melbourne Holocaust Museum.