If you had to find a common thread, besides the Holocaust, running through the three documentaries airing on the Sundance Channel on Tuesday night, it might be the theme of a journey. Actual trips can be found in each, probes into far corners of the globe, but it's the filmmakers' moral and emotional quests that propel each story along its trajectory.
The Sundance Channel observes Holocaust Remembrance Day with six hours of film, beginning at 5:30 p.m. with Karl Nussbaum's short, "Raw Images From the Optic Cross," and extending into the wee hours with Marcel Ophuls' epic "Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie." Pola Rapaport's hourlong "Family Secret" airs between the two.
The three works are as different in style and temperament as they could be, but their concerns all fall within the penumbra of the Nazi genocide and its legacy of shame.
If it sounds like a bleak evening in front of the television, it is. But that's offset by the power these works have to sadden and enrage us, to force us to think about the unthinkable and re-evaluate our own conduct and values.
Ophuls' "Hotel Terminus" (7 p.m.) assumes most of this burden, partly due to its length (a marathon four hours and 27 minutes) and partly due to Ophuls' goal: rooting out the moral failings of everyone from Barbie's neighbors to the governments — French, American, Bolivian — that protected the Nazi officer after the war.
That's in addition to tracing the life of the monstrous Barbie, a k a the Butcher of Lyon, from his boyhood through his tenure as a Gestapo chief in occupied France, to his extradition from Bolivia to France and his subsequent life conviction, 40 years after the Holocaust.
If you're up for a late night, you should settle in for the Ophuls film — it's worth the investment. But you could also tune in just for the two shorter films that precede "Hotel Terminus" and still find much worth seeing.
Nussbaum's "Images" begins the evening, though its oppressive montage of bizarre images might immediately turn some viewers away. The film is less a narrative than a dreamlike visual experience, in which Nussbaum provides only the bare minimum of context. For half an hour, unsettling drawings and photographs (of grotesque physical forms, scientific diagrams, feathered wings, an orchid, a keyhole and other seemingly incongruous symbols) fade in and out, set against haunting original music and the filmmaker's occasional voice-over. Nussbaum's father, he tells us, was a "hidden child" during Hitler's rule, escaping the death camps and ending up the only surviving member of his family. And now Nussbaum, the American son of this guilt-filled survivor, has constructed his identity based on his father's suffering.
Pola Rapaport's film (6 p.m.) takes a more traditional approach, though her subject is a similarly personal one. After her mother receives a letter from a Romanian man claiming to know Pola's Jewish father, the filmmaker discovers that the man, Pierre Radu-lescu-Banu, is her half-brother.
The film documents Pola and Pierre's bittersweet meeting and subsequent bonding as they trace their father's life through letters, interviews and a visit to his hometown.
Though less directly related to the Holocaust than the other two films, "Family Secret" demonstrates the insidiously broad reach of the fear and hatred that can fuel a genocide — and that still breed so much violence today.