For Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg wasn’t allowed to film inside the infamous German Nazi concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. It is an experience he shares with various other film and TV creators who have requested access in recent decades.
Spielberg’s crew instead constructed a replica of a portion of the camp just outside the entrance of Birkenau. Others came up with other approaches to recreate the horrible experience of the camp on screens.
Now, 80 years after the liberation of the camp, at a time of “fewer survivors and growing global visitor numbers,” there is a new, digital, way for producers and other creatives to take audiences inside it. The Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and Memorial, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation, and partners from the European film industry are unveiling details of Picture From Auschwitz, described as “the most extensive certified digital historical site of Auschwitz-Birkenau as a virtual film location,” at the Marché du Film in Cannes on Thursday.
“The memorial site has been off limits for movie production for four decades, more or less,” Wojciech Soczewica, CEO of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation, explains to THR. “Documentaries can be shot because they are not large-scale productions. They don’t pose a serious risk to those authentic roads, to the buildings, to the staircases and to personal items of victims and survivors.”
He continues: “The limitations are in place because it is an authentic site, a witness to the worst of crimes, unimaginable today. The concentration and extermination camp was set up to target European Jews, Poles, Soviet POWs, Roma and Sinti and other groups.”
The central idea behind the use of the latest technology is to share information that film projects need, “provide access to the historical grounds and to protect what is so sacred and so fragile, the physical remains,” thereby preserving “the authenticity of the original site,” Soczewica says.
Picture From Auschwitz “harnesses cutting-edge 3D scanning technologies used by the expert team led by Maciej Żemojcin,” the partners highlight. “The certified digital replica offers filmmakers a revolutionary tool rooted in accuracy and ethical storytelling, helping combat denial and distortion at a time when misinformation is on the rise. Designed for a wide range of films – from documentaries to large-scale Hollywood productions – Picture From Auschwitz supports the telling of the true story of the camp.”
Renowned Polish director Agnieszka Holland will join the Cannes event remotely, while photo composer and Auschwitz survivor Ryszard Horowitz, who was on Oskar Schindler’s list and appeared as a mourner in the film (and also designed the illustration that became the 1995 Cannes festival poster), will speak on a panel moderated by Soczewica. They will also be joined by Żemojcin, virtual production and AI film expert and one of the initiators of Picture from Auschwitz, Paweł Sawicki, deputy spokesman, Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, and Kristen Davis, an advisor on ethical, sustainable tech use cases who serves as strategic lead on the virtual film location project.
The technical team has completed a 1:1 digital replica of Auschwitz I, which is available to filmmakers from this week. Samples from the test shoot of Picture From Auschwitz are being showcased during this year’s fest in the Palais des Festivals. Next steps are the completion of the digital interiors of Auschwitz I, as well as the exteriors and interiors of Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp.
Licensing fees will directly support the Memorial, “thus supporting its global mission in commemorating all victims, fighting antisemitism and all forms of hatred as well as raising reflection about our contemporary moral responsibility,” the partners said.
Filmmakers licensing the data get access to a fully certified digital replica, “ensuring accurate portrayals of the site,” they highlight. “Every element of the space – starting from the “Arbeit Macht Frei” gate, fence posts, buildings with every brick or roof tile – is being meticulously documented, revealing perspectives and details invisible to the naked eye.”
Żemojcin tells THR that “now that we and the foundation have this data, we really believe it will be reprocessed in 100 years or an even further future by technology that doesn’t exist yet.”
Despite the use of the latest technology, the project has required patience. “Technically, we started almost three years ago,” Żemojcin explains. “A very good example of the instant value of this project for me was the story of how we scanned the so-called birch alley by the end of the camp,” he recalls. “The trees, which can live about as long as a human and were planted during the time the Nazis were there, were cut one week after we scanned it. So we have the digital representation of these trees and all the related data.”
Survivor Horowitz appreciates that. “I’m very much for preserving the place for as many generations in the future as possible,” he tells THR. “I visited the place twice in my life: first, as a prisoner, as a five-year-old child, and then in the ’70s, when I visited Poland for the first time after my departure from New York. I took along my beloved professor of fine arts, and we decided to take a trip to see the camp, and my reliving the circumstances was very painful. I personally don’t have any need or plans to go to the camp again, but I feel it’s of utmost importance for the now generation and for revisionists, people who believe this never happened or the place doesn’t exist, to be able to have more personal contact with the camp.”
Concludes Horowitz: “I just hope that the fact that we’re dealing with a virtual environment is not going to agitate some people and make them feel uncomfortable, because it’s not happening on the real site.”
Holland (Green Border; Europa, Europa; In Darkness) shares with THR that she used technology used for Picture From Auschwitz in Green Border and “some TV series, such as House of Cards,” explaining: “If I have the possibility to use the real location, I always prefer the real location. But I understand that sometimes it’s easier to use that kind of technology. I have a very positive feeling about technological progress in movie-making, and I think it mostly helps to extend the language and the possibilities of storytelling, and also to reduce the budget, if possible. Sometimes, filmmakers are constructing camps, which is possible for Steven Spielberg, but is not always possible for other filmmakers.”
She herself contacted Auschwitz to ask if you could shoot there in the past. “A long time ago, I had a project which in the end I decided not to shoot,” she recalls. “It was a project where most of the story happened in Auschwitz, but the request was declined.”
Holland doesn’t plan to revisit that project. “I did three movies about the Holocaust, and I feel like I’m done,” she says. “But I’m really curious what the new generation will bring to that story. Jonathan Glazer made this movie [The Zone of Interest] recently, which showed another perspective on that story. So I think the possibilities to tell those stories again are endless.”
And she emphasizes that the need for these stories feels ever more timely and more urgent today. “When it comes to the experience of the Holocaust and Second World War and Nazism, it was some kind of a vaccination for Europe, especially against totalitarian and nationalistic and racist (tendencies), which worked for quite a long time and which helped to create something as unique as the European Union,” Holland tells THR. “But I think that the vaccine is evaporating right now. So, we are in some kind of vicious circle and need a new boost. We have to renew the vaccine.”
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