The Last Stage (Ostatni etap, 1948)

The main strengths of the film is that it has very recent time the memory of the German concentration camps in World War II, certain sequences were shot in Auschwitz itself and that some of the facts stated they were experienced in the first person by his director, Wanda Jakubowska. With these assumptions, expected a stifling and hard story, but the director can decant to show everyday life in the female barracks, with their intrigues and their desperate struggle for survival, rather than by the most sordid and cruel aspects not are evaded, but you have some gray in their key features. It seems that events are still too painful and close in memory of the author and it does not dare to dwell on them, still gripped by the horror of it has also been a victim of the same.

As announced at the beginning of the film, the actors are all Polish, so it has more merit that are pronounced in German in those scenes performed by officers or staff of this nationality. "The Last Stage" is not a story about the Holocaust in WW II but almost a documentary of the facts narrated in a style content and, above all, an admirable honesty.

7/10