★★★1/2 The Wansee conference -the meeting of Nazi leaders where the “Final Solution to the Jewish problem” was decided in January 1942- was treated at least twice: in a German film from 1984 and in an American one little more than a decade. But here the actual and preserved minutes of that meeting were used. There are the butcher Haydrich, the bureaucrat Eichmann – for whom Annah Arendt coined the term “banality of evil” – and the German industrialists willing to collect money from public works to design the death camps and the gas. The discussions seem trivial, everything takes place in a climate of cordiality and terrifying normality. What is being talked about is industrially murdering eleven million people. The film, however, imagines things: the gestures of the participants, their emphases and their movements. And all of that lends even more weight to the horror. A fiction that experiments with the term “documentary”.
