Purity Beats Everything

Pastoral images of Danish landscape are accompanied by a woman's description of her experiences in Hitler's death camps. Miriam Lichterman, is a white elderly woman who has survived the Nazi death camps and found freedom in South Africa under apartheid. The romanticized notion of racial purity and selection connects Nazism with Apartheid. In this philosophically self-reflexive film, the director tells us in a deep and soothing voice over, that, "We can only experience other people's worlds by projecting them on our own private worlds." In this unique approach to the holocaust, the director is very present in his questioning, his doubts, and his consideration of his own relationship to these stories and events. The interview with Lichterman plays on his laptop as he stands gazing out the window. Everyday objects from his world stand in for the horrific events of hers: clothes drying on line, dance and cheer to orchestral music, sounds of crowds, and recordings of Hitler's speeches. "The times were different then and yet the times are still the same. The insanities Adolf Hitler shouted out into the world are still reverberating in our present days. And echoes have a dangerous tendency to resurrect disguised as the future."