Kino International - Mein Krieg My Private War (1991)

A singular cinematic experience that is alternatively tragic, poignant and deeply disturbing, MEIN KRIEG offers an unprecedented documentary view of World War II through the eyes of six young German soldiers. Carrying home movie cameras through training and combat in devastated Belorussia, these six Wehrmacht infantrymen created profoundly moving documents of the horrors of war and captured the odd moments of haunting beauty and human intimacy that occasionally rose from this 20th Century Armageddon. This remarkably well preserved footage–much of it in sharp and vibrant color–offers a soldier's-eye view of the day-to-day workings of the Nazi war machine as it advanced into Russia during 1942. The only narrative voices are those of the soldiers who, fifty years later, recall the transgressions of their youths, recount the social pressures that coerced them into military service and reflect the emotional repercussions they have experienced in the decades that followed. By endowing fascism at its most extreme with a human face, MEIN KRIEG helps us better understand how the unthinkable was able to occur, and serves as an eerie reminder of how tenuous is the division between patriotic extremism and regimented barbarity.

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