Spanish photographer Francesc Boix, imprisoned in the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp, works in the SS Photographic Service. Between 1943 and 1945, he hides, with the help of other prisoners, thousands of negatives, with the purpose of showing the freed world the atrocities committed by the Nazis, exhaustively documented. He will be a key witness during the Nuremberg Trials.
With Franco perfectly happy for the Nazis to do his dirty work for him, many of those communists fleeing the new Fascist regime in Spain found themselves imprisoned in labour camps. One such prisoner is Francesc Boix (Mario Casas) who cottons on fairly quickly that the survival rate in this place isn't high. Luckily for him though, they are sticklers for red tape and that means photographs - and he knows how to take and develop them. He manages to ingraties himself with "Ricken" (Richard van Weyden) and is soon a sort of trusty, safe(r) from the atrocities being carried out by both the camp guards and by their empowered "Kapo" - a few crooks, murderers and rapists given the job of policing any resistance from amongst their own numbers. The more work he does, the more abhorred Boix becomes and he hits on the idea of preserving some of the evidence he has procured for posterity. What better way to prove for certain what was going on than to keep the negatives of the gruesome images he was routinely required to capture? As the tide of the war begins to change, the captives start to think there might be grounds for optimism but as the allies get closer might the brutish commandant Ziereis (Stefan Weinert) tame his excesses or will he become even worse, and can Boix manage to keep his negatives safe as the ovens start to be used for altogether different, evidence burning, purposes? I thought that Casas really owned his part here and coupled with some detailed production design; a really quite powerful ensemble cast and some convincing imagery of the daily barbarity makes this an uncomfortably authentic film to watch. That any people could inflict torture on such a large scale and on such an indiscriminate fashion on just about everyone else - and that some of their own nationals were prepared to enthusiastically participate - makes the hairs on your neck stand up and Mar Targarona's often intimate direction allows sense of fear and tension to accumulate without us terribly certain as to what's going to happen until the very end. It's all based on true events and is a tough film to watch.
