A film about Josef Mengele presented in Cannes

Kirill Serebrennikov's film "The Disappearance of Josef Mengele", based on the meticulously researched bestseller by Olivier Guez, with the great German actor August Diehl in the lead role, follows the story of notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele during his fugitive years, from Paraguay to the Brazilian jungle.

"The Angel of Death of Auschwitz", this was his role and his nickname in the concebtratuon camp of Auschwitz. His name is to our days the equivalant of horror and terror. He was the one who decided which prisoners are sent to the gas chambers. And not only, he killed many people through cruel medical experiments. However, he was never punished for this, as he excaped to South America where he was hiding until his death in 1979. These years on the run across South America are now the subject of Kirill Serebrennikov's new film "The Disappearance of Josef Mengele."

"The war ends for everyone at a different time," Josef Mengele says in the film. For him, the Second World War will continue until his death. 

The film follows him from Argentina through Paraguay to Brazil, where he dies in a swimming accident in 1979. And with the help of sympathizers, and financed by a Bavarian entrepreneur, Mengele manages to hide from justice in South America for 30 years.  

Director and screenwriter Kirill Serebrennikov effectively captures how German war criminals were able to live undisturbed in South America. He presents "The Disappearance of Josef Mengele" as an atmospherically dense black-and-white film in the style of a film noir. The few scenes where he is using color are reserved for the doctors memories of Auschwitz, and seen through Mengele's eyes, the hell of the concentration camp transforms into a sun-drenched love idyll with a bathing lake, strongly reminiscent of Jonathan Glazer's "The Zone of Interest." Serebrennikov employs these nostalgic memories when Mengele's son Rolf visits his father in São Paulo in 1977 and confronts the father with his role in Auschwitz.

August Diehl delivers a magnificent performance in the lead role delivering the psychological profile of an incorrigible man who is oblivious to any guilt and obsessed by the idea of a master race, to which he naturally belongs.

Serebrennikov illustrates that not only Mengele's memory of Auschwitz is grotesquely distorted, he is a mad man. Mengele laughs when he sends prisoners to the gas chambers, he proudly demonstrates and explains his human experiments. It is tough stuff that Serebrennikov presents to the audience, and while watching it the question arises whether this fictionalization of concentration camps is tolerable

And while it's a powerful statement against repression, It raises also the question of whether societies would still make it so easy for today's war criminals to escape their punishment.

Alice Kanterian