Films Lyda

Frans Buyens's moving and inventive film is based on his own autobiographical novel, which deals in the most sensitive terms possible with the subject of euthanasia.

Following the archival horror of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps, this poignant documentary chronicles a study trip organized by the Belgian Auschwitz-Birkenau Association. The film follows 120 young university students and 10 Holocaust survivors as they journey back to Auschwitz and Birkenau. Standing on the historic grounds, the youth confront the devastating past. Through deeply personal dialogues, survivors and students openly debate ethics, institutional racism, and the dangers of dictatorship.

This film deals with the fate of children during the Second World War. The Nazis divided children into two categories: “the good ones,” the Aryan children, and “the bad ones,” the others. In the name of ultranationalism, Nazism, the theory of the Übermensch, and racism, Aryan children were mentally indoctrinated, while the others were imprisoned in camps and physically destroyed. These “others” were mainly children from non-Aryan and supposedly impure races: Jews, Poles, Russians, Yugoslavs, and Roma. For this film, Lydia Chagoll conducted research in World War II documentation centers, museums, and concentration camp archives in several countries, collecting texts, documents, and photographs. The film consists of a montage of photos and footage filmed by the Nazis themselves, accompanied by voice-over commentary based entirely on quotations from Nazi publications, laws, decrees, directives, newspapers, schoolbooks, reports, and political texts.

This film deals with the experiences of children in concentration camps. The more so because it discloses, above all, circumstances that have hitherto been almost completely untold, namely the fate of children in the camps under the Japanese occupation during World War II. It's a meeting between two women who, when children, were prisoners in concentration camps. One of them was deported to Auschwitz when she was 13 and remained there for two years; the other was interned in a Japanese camp in Indonesia when she was 11 and stayed there for more than three years. The two women talk, each reliving their experiences through a child's heart and soul.