Cinema
The Last Stage
Ostatni etap
Wanda Jakubowska · 1948
Synopsis
In Auschwitz-Birkenau, women from many countries live between forced labour, the infirmary and the selections. Marta Weiss, a young Jewish woman who arrived with her family, is taken on from the first day as an interpreter because she speaks German. Eugenia, a Russian prisoner who is a doctor, treats the sick as best she can without medicines; when an international commission comes to visit the camp, she learns a few phrases of German to tell the visitors the truth, while the women organise resistance and solidarity under the smoke of the crematoria.
Context
The director said she had survived the camp because she wanted to make a film about it. She wrote it with Gerda Schneider, a former prisoner like herself, and shot it in 1947 on the site itself, part of which she restored, with inhabitants of Oświęcim as extras, each character speaking their own language. Released on 28 March 1948, the film received the grand prize at the Mariánské Lázně festival and a nomination at the British Academy awards; it was digitally restored in 2019 by the National Film Archive.
Who it is for
A little under two hours, in Polish, German and Russian; an ensemble film, marked by the ideology of its time.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as the first great fiction film about the camps, it made the international reputation of postwar Polish cinema.
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