''Fotoamator'' (internationally released as ''Photographer'' ) is a 1998

Polish Polish may refer to: * Anything from or related to Poland, a country in Europe * Polish language * Poles Poles,, ; singular masculine: ''Polak'', singular feminine: ''Polka'' or Polish people, are a West Slavic nation and ethnic group, w ...

documentary film A documentary film or documentary is a non-fictional motion-picture intended to "document reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction, education or maintaining a historical record". Bill Nichols has characterized the documentary in te ...

directed by Dariusz Jablonski, examining the life of the Jewish population and their Nazi overseers in the

Łódź Ghetto The Łódź Ghetto or Litzmannstadt Ghetto (after the Nazi German name for Łódź) was a Nazi ghetto established by the German authorities for Polish Jews and Roma following the Invasion of Poland. It was the second-largest ghetto in all of ...

Subject

In 1987, several hundred color slides documenting scenes from the Łódź Ghetto during

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...

were discovered in a second-hand bookstore in

Vienna en, Viennese , iso_code = AT-9 , registration_plate = W , postal_code_type = Postal code , postal_code = , timezone = CET , utc_offset = +1 , timezone_DST ...

Austria Austria, , bar, Östareich officially the Republic of Austria, is a country in the southern part of Central Europe, lying in the Eastern Alps. It is a federation of nine states, one of which is the capital, Vienna, the most populous ...

. These slides were the work of Walter Genewein, an Austrian citizen serving the

Nazis Nazism ( ; german: Nazismus), the common name in English for National Socialism (german: Nationalsozialismus, ), is the far-right totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in N ...

. Being an accountant in the ghetto's council, he solicited for turning the ghetto into a prosperous and well-organised company, and since he was not just an ambitious office worker, but also an enthusiastic photographer, he recorded their "achievements" with a camera. Genewein's slides are used by the authors to show—both through them and, to some extent, in spite of them—the real history of the Łódź Ghetto and the suffering and eventual extermination of the Polish Jews living there. The photographs are combined and compared with the recollections of Dr. Arnold Mostowicz, who worked as a doctor in the ghetto, and the last surviving witness of the events.

Awards

* Adolf Grimme Awards 2000 – Documentary/Cultural * Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival 1999 – Joris Ivens Award * Banff Television Festival 1999 – Banff Rockie Award * Bavarian TV Award 1999 * Biarritz International Festival of Audiovisual Programming 1999 – Golden FIPA & Prix Planète * Cracow Film Festival 1998 – Don Quixote Award * DoubleTake Documentary Film Festival1998 – Jury AwardInternet Movie Database
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References

External links

*{{IMDb title, id=0188996, title=Fotoamator *
Fotoamator
' discussed on www.culture.pl 1998 films Documentary films about the Holocaust Polish documentary films 1998 documentary films Łódź Ghetto Documentary films about Poland Films scored by Michał Lorenc