movie world

Kapo is an unblinking depiction of life and death inside a Nazi concentration camp—one of the very first films that dared to take viewers on a journey through such horrors, which were still fresh in people’s minds.

Kapo's protagonist is Edith (Susan Strasberg), a fourteen-year-old Jewish girl who in the film’s first three minutes is ripped from the streets of occupied Paris and carted away with her family to a German concentration camp, where she is separated from her parents, whom she never sees again. Gillo Pontecorvo and writter Franco Solinas then boldly tell a tale not of a pure victim but of a conflicted young woman who betrays her own people to survive, taking the identity of a dead, non-Jewish thief and, after being moved to a Polish camp, selling her body to German officers in exchange for food and, ultimately, the title of kapo, or warden.

The film is a study of survival as well as what a person will do during one of the most horrific atrocities of humanity where she would endure her own sense of de-humanization.

The film offers redemption, both for Edith and mankind, though it shows that this often must come with sacrifice.

Director: Gillo Pontecorvo
Actors: Susan Strasberg, Laurent Terzieff, Emmanuelle Riva, Didi Perego, Gianni Garko, Annabella Besi, Graziella Galvani, Paola Pitagora, Eleonora Bellinzaghi, Bruno Scipioni, Dragomir Felba
Country: Italy, France, Yugoslavia
Genre: Drama, History, War

DVD9 | PAL 16:9 | 01:52:09 | 7.36 Gb + 3% rec
Language: English, Italiano
Subtitles: English, Italiano

BD25 | 1080p AVC | 01:57:06 | 22.5 Gb + 3% rec
Language: Italian
Subtitles: English, French, Japanese