Forgotten Transports to Latvia

From a filmmaker's perspective, the series of documentaries about forgotten transports of the Jewish population to Eastern Europe is not that interesting, because Lukáš Přibyl is primarily a historian, and in his first documentary project, he simply combines the most banal production procedure - alternating talking heads and old photos or visual recordings - but the strength of the documentary does not lie in that. The strength manifests itself in the fact that Přibyl preserves human memory by capturing the last living witnesses of past massacres and conveying their testimony to a wider audience. Had he come up with this idea 10 years later, the living witnesses simply would not exist anymore. Historians know the history of these extermination camps and ghettos, but unlike the tragedy of Auschwitz, this part of history remains unknown to the general public. Přibyl portrays the fate of Jewish exiles in an environment that was permeated with antisemitism and local nationalism. A very powerful documentary. Overall impression: 80%. (10/27/2010)