A Victim's Perspective

We expand our festival’s scope this year with renowned Dutch artist Erik van Loon’s ineffably haunting 11-hour film installation A Victim’s Perspective, on view in the lobbies of the Castro and Roda Theatres. This past January marked the 60th anniversary of the Death March from Auschwitz: as the Russians advanced on the German lines, the 60,000 remaining prisoners at Auschwitz were forced to walk 40 miles in the bitter Polish winter under the most brutal circumstances to an evacuation station, where they would be transported to German camps away from the front. Some 20,000 are thought to have perished along this path. On the anniversary in 2005, van Loon, with a camera mounted to his body, walked this same route...from the gates of Auschwitz through now modern and unremarkable Polish towns and along ordinary streets and highways to the train station at Wodzislaw. The simplicity of the idea belies the enormity of the event it recalls. The project can never truly recapitulate the experience, nor does it attempt to memorialize it traditionally; for van Loon it is unspeakable to lay any tribute on such horror. It is a silent commentary on all this--and more. A Victim’s Perspective is a profound reflection on committing the act of remembering and an indictment of the fact of forgetting. Walk with these ghosts a little. The more time one spends with the film, the more it reveals the questions that it asks.