Can Hollywood successfully tackle the horror of the Holocaust?

Three new films about the Holocaust are set to be released this year as Hollywood continues to grapple with the horror of the Nazi murder of 6 million Jews. 

The films "could not be more different", said The Guardian's Jonathan Freedland, but they do share one thing: "a tacit belief that the Shoah remains humanity's ultimate moral test case." 

As the movies prepare for release, one overriding question remains, Freedland added: "can cinema ever hope to adequately confront humanity’s darkest chapter?"

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'Daunting challenge'

Countless films have been made about the Holocaust, from George Stevens's "The Diary of Anne Frank", to Roberto Benigni's "Life is Beautiful" to Steven Spielberg's seminal "Schindler's List". 

All of them face "a daunting, possibly insuperable challenge", said The Economist. "They must attempt to convey the horror while knowing that their efforts are bound to be inadequate, and risk seeming disrespectful of the suffering."

Part of this complexity is the "natural impulse to tell the stories of those who lived, rather than died", said Freedland. 

Director Stanley Kubrick abandoned his own Holocaust film after "Schindler's List" came out, saying: "The Holocaust is about 6 million people who get killed, 'Schindler's List' is about 600 who don't."

Holocaust films "mostly come in two varieties", said US film critic website Roger Ebert. Some are survival stories, other are "bleak, harrowing viewing experiences" that emphasise the fact that "survival sadly wasn’t the reality that most European Jews experienced". 

"Schindler's List", which turns 30 this year, "somehow navigated both of these realities at the same time, and did so for a mass audience", Ebert said. 

Like "Schindler's List", this year's crop of films share an "unexpectedly hopeful message too", said Freedland. "It is that even the deepest darkness passes eventually" and that "for all the torments of the present… we are lucky to live now, not then – even if we sometimes struggle to see it".

'Linking the past to the present' 

For The New York Times' Esther Zuckerman, the three movies set for release this year are seeking to "challenge the idea of what [Holocaust films] can and should be". 

In "The Zone of Interest", the British director Jonathan Glazer adapts a Martin Amis novel portraying the daily life of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz. The film "barely goes inside the camp", instead focusing on the "visually idyllic world the couple have created for their family all while Höss plans the extermination of the Jews imprisoned next door".

"Occupied City", based on Bianca Stigter's book "Atlas of an Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945", explains what happened during the Nazi occupation at various buildings in the Dutch city. It was made by British director Steve McQueen, who is married to Stigter.

The third picture out this year, "Origin", is also based on a book: Isabel Wilkerson's non-fiction best seller "Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents". The film compares the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany to that of Black people in America and the Dalits in India.

All of the films are successful, in different ways, said Zuckerman, because they all "turn an analytical eye on their subject matter, linking the horrors of the past to the present". Doing so makes "the subject feel as upsettingly resonant as ever".