Sobibor

A little background about the Sobib�r concentration camp: Located in Poland under the German occupation, Sobib�r is thought to have been the site at which between 250,000 and 350,000 Jews from all over Europe – and also Jewish Russian POWs – were murdered. In 1943, an uprising led to 300 Jews escaping from the camp. 100 died during the escape; Polish citizens reportedly killed and helped the German's recapture another 150. But some escaped to freedom, and their stories informed the subsequent trials.

Director Konstantin Khabenskiy also stars in "Sobibor," taking the role of the uprising's architect, a Russian POW named Alexander Perchesky – or, to his fellow inmates, Sasha. Delivered to Sobibor after a failed uprising at a camp in Minsk, Sasha and his men regroup, take the measure of the camp's inmates, and are initially unimpressed. "Some kind of underground they've got here," one of Sasha's men grouses. "They're like livestock going to the slaughter."

If the inmates of Sobibor lack starch, that's because they have been carefully inculcated to monitor and turn on one another. (Such is the nature of oppression.) But a strain of resistance does run through the prisoners at Sobibor, and it takes only a few weeks to gel into a plan.

In this telling, Sasha meets a man named Lukya, who takes the opposite approach. "Endure and have faith," she counsels, unwilling to see him throw his life away on a bid for freedom she assumes will be doomed. Endurance, as it turns out, is indeed a crucial part of the equation – but faith of a passive sort is not enough. Sometimes the better part of faith is the belief one has in oneself and one's own worth as a human being – worth being something the Germans, in their increasingly sadistic and murderous amusements, are unwilling to ascribe to their Jewish captives.

How much can and should a human being endure in the name of survival? The question hangs over the film like the fog of ashes forever drifting down onto the camp. The film demonstrates the struggle to find that line between self-preservation and principled resistance – a line that often seems grimly close to out and out extinction. Only when a train full of corpses pulls in to Sobibor and is met with the same cheerful, false assurances that greet the passengers of the train that arrives at the start of the film do the inmates begin to take the idea seriously that it's not enough to hang tight and hope their luck doesn't run out. The train has come from another camp, which the Germans have ordered "liquidated" before the advancing Russian army can liberate it. The hope for survival by merely enduring is finally revealed to be just as fraudulent as all the assurances the German guards have dangled over the heads of their victims; still, our heroes must endure some more, making their way through a ghastly carnival of atrocities that enliven a drunken party thrown by the camp's German officers.

"Sobibor" was submitted by Russia for Oscar consideration, and it is a powerful work of cinema – and an important, highly relevant piece of history that's been brought life. That said, it does feel a little cheeky for Russia, of all nations, to hold this film up as the best of Russian filmmaking – not because it isn't a worthy film, but because given Russia's stance on LGBTQ issues and its treatment of LGBTQ people, one gets the sense that Russian audiences are every bit in need as anyone else of sitting down, watching this movie, and thinking about what it does to a people when they have embraced cruelty as a substitution for justice and sadism as a valid alternative for civility.