Lest we forget. That’s the consensus among KZ’s tour guides, men who shepherd tourist parties and field trips throughout the monument of horrors that is Mauthasen’s notorious concentration camp. Having to relive the Holocaust on a daily basis, their only rationale is to assure we remember. As a rowdy group of teenagers squabble in the camp’s parking lot, they’re soon silenced into disbelief as the past atrocities of SS officers are administered in cold, methodical doses: stones in a wall are equated to death; green pastures are revealed as sites for mass murder; ritual dehumanisation is par for the course. At one point a student faints – hardly surprisingly, given the film’s penchant for gut-wrenching description, a thousand times more horrific when allowed to churn in the imagination. And as these stories are relayed, the camera tightens its frame on the many visitors. Their expressions speak volumes.

Festival programmers have appropriately paired this with Lajos Koltai’s Holocaust memoir Fateless – a film also at the mercy of Mauthasen. The polished exterior of that film tends to undermine its overall clutch against Rex Bloomstein’s documentary though; without showing anything except ghostly spaces and remnants of death, his is clearly the more distressing work. Perversely, his film exposes new atrocities too: a cider house sits on the location of a former SS eatery; residents gush at their suburban greenbelt paradise, only a stone’s throw away from hell; white affluent couples now occupy nearby housing once reserved for Nazi camp officers. And they couldn’t care less. As Fateless juxtaposed starving Jews with popcorn-consuming audience members, KZ goes that extra step further by revealing McDonald’s emblems in the same breath as signage towards the Konzentrationslager. It’s all rather excruciating, albeit necessary viewing, and a harsh reminder that history is never buried, only exhumed. Not the companion piece to Fateless as some may have you believe, but its more disturbing, sobering alternative.—Tim Wong