MIFF this year featured three documentaries that, in their different ways, grapple with the question of human evil – and the violence that both sustains and ends it.

Most notable is the remastered and restored German Concentration Camps Factual Survey. In only its sixth screening worldwide, the film is presented in a manner that hoves as closely as possible to the intentions of its filmmakers.

The footage was shot during the liberation of concentration camps across Europe in 1945 and makes for incredibly distressing and confronting viewing. In form, the film mimics newsreels made at the time, with many shots – including of countless corpses being removed from the camps and buried – being delivered without narration or music. This eerie solemnity seems to capture our difficulty, both then and now, in processing mass tragedy.

Because German Concentration Camps was made as part of the Allies’ Denazification initiative, the film represents an incredibly immediate record of the general post-war mindset, frozen at a moment when the dust was still settling. Imperial War Museum senior curator Dr Toby Haggith pointed out, in Q&A session following the Melbourne screening, that the narration only mentions Jewish people twice, simply because the immensity of what had happened was still not understood by those documenting it.

Watchers of the Sky, a new film from Edel Belzberg, focuses in part on how our access to information has changed the speed and nature of our response to tragedy. It is part chronicle of the life of Raphael Lemkin, the man who coined the term “genocide”, and part bleak glimpse into the lives of those carrying on his legacy, and it covers broad emotional and historical territory with great care.

Where Lemkin toiled until his death for recognition of genocide as a distinct international crime, the film’s other subjects are in the midst of their own, descendant battles. Rwandan genocide survivor Emmanuel Uwurukundo runs massive refugee camps in Darfur; Pulitzer-winning journalist Samantha Power serves as US ambassador to the United Nations; Luis Moreno-Ocampo is chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court (ICC); and Ben Ferencz was chief prosecutor at the Einsatzgruppen trial at Nuremberg and later a passionate campaigner for the ICC’s formation.

Reportedly assembled from 800 hours of footage, Watchers of the Sky is slightly unwieldy in its construction but breath-taking in its ability to manage these multiple narratives.

Each subject fulfils a different but important function within the film in their response to violence. Uwurukundo works directly with refugees in a war-torn African region, displaced by a conflict in which many have no direct stake but by which all are directly threatened. Moreno-Ocampo represents the legal response to violence, and the film charts his attempt to indict Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir for his alleged criminal responsibility for the Rwandan genocide.

Power’s angle is diplomacy. She is faced with the difficult task of weighing diverse international interests against the perceived moral good. Ferencz, meanwhile, is the caretaker and activist, warning against the recurrence of violence and lobbying for a firmer legal response to it.

Watchers of the Sky and German Concentration Camps Factual Survey provide a succinct and moving overview of the countless factors that comprise how we respond to violence. This very much includes the emotional and physical response; the footage from the camps is full of the rage and despair of those forced into them.

To them, Dan Krauss’s film The Kill Team functions as a kind of evidentiary post-script.

In 2010, news broke of a group of American soldiers who were killing Afghani civilians for sport and placing weapons on their corpses to justify the murders. One member of the group, Adam Winfield, blew the whistle on the others but nonetheless was charged with murder alongside them.

While The Kill Team is defined by Winfield’s pending legal battle, more damning are the interviews with the other soldiers. Their insistence that they were influenced by their rogue staff sergeant – and their attempts to blame a US military culture that builds soldiers up to be attackers rather than defenders – is at odds with their admission that they were excited about killing. Alarming though their testimony is, it is no more than a distillation of the casual, deadly manner in which humanity repeats its past mistakes.

Where Camps functions as an artefact, a preservation of memory, Watchers of the Sky takes a more historical response, drawing the line from the past to the present. The Kill Team, though, appears to suggest that the impulse to, and capacity for, violence is innate.

An incredibly telling line closes out German Concentration Camps Factual Survey: “By God’s grace, we who live will learn.”

More Critics Campus