Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5416 in DVD
• Released on: 2008-04-28
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Format: PAL
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 106 minutes

Synopsis
Writer-director-actor Tim Blake Nelson presents THE GREY ZONE, a relentlessly bleak drama that uses one of history's most incomprehensible calamities to address the ultimate question of human survival. Based in large part on Miklos Nyiszli's book, AUSCHWITZ: A DOCTOR'S EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT, THE GREY ZONE is set in the nightmarish world of Auschwitz in the 1940s. The film tells the brutal tale of the twelfth Sonderkommando unit, Jewish prisoners who were granted a few extra months of life in return for their services in helping with the genocide of their people. While organizing a revolt against the Nazis, a group of Sonderkommandos (played with ferocious intensity by David Arquette, Daniel Benzali, David Chandler, and Steve Buscemi) discover a young girl who has somehow managed to survive the gas chamber. Risking their lives, they team up with a fellow Jew, Doctor Nyiszli (Allan Corduner), to revive the fragile youngster and redeem themselves in the process.
Nelson's excruciating drama is all the more unsettling for its unflinching honesty. By placing his characters in a world suffused with death, he creates an unbearable scenario where every decision determines the fate of dozens, if not hundreds, of innocent lives. THE GREY ZONE also features deeply impassioned performances by Harvey Keitel, Mira Sorvino, and Natasha Lyonne.

Customer Reviews

Story about the Sonderkommandos in Auschwitz
Tim Blake Nelson, the director of "The Grey Zone" (USA 2001), states that this is not a movie about the Holocaust. It is about the choices a human being is ready to make in order to stay alive - even if it is just for a little while longer.
The central figure is Dr. Miklos Nyiszli, a Hungarian Jew who assisted with Josef Mengele's infamous experiments. The events are based on his records and on notes of members of the "Sonderkommandos". They take place in Auschwitz, 1944.
The SS dropped the Zyklon B into the gas chambers - everything else was done by Jewish prisoners: leading the victims into the changing rooms, assuring them they were going to have a shower, locking them in.
Then, afterwards, collecting the bodies and burning them in the crematoria ovens.
There was even leisure time for them to play chess or to enjoy the items they were able to loot.
And the question for the viewer becomes: how would you have chosen?

The impact of this film results from it's coolness, it's unsentimentality. It is much worse than "Schindler's list" or "The Pianist". Those were stories of survivors.
The movie was shot in Bulgaria and the extras were recruited from the region. They were queuing up for roles women had to shave their heads for and people lying naked on top of each other as "human lettuce" in the gas chamber (information from the bonus material).
If you want to learn about the death camps in the third Reich - watch the BBC series on Auschwitz. If you want to understand more - watch this.

Very, very sad.
Without doubt one of the best films I've seen but I'd never be able to sit through it again. Gone is the possitive message of Schindler's List, instead we have an honest look at what we are really like as a species. Anger, fear and futility predominate throughout. All aparently based on fact. The poor sods that took part in the rebellion should be remembered for what they did yet we prefer to build monuments to rich gernerals. It's alright to get all pasificst and hippy about violence and such stuff but what they were up against was intolerable.I was depressed for about three days after this film but it was worth it. All the actors perform incredibly well. Harvey Keital is terrifying as the camp functionary who has no illusiones about what awaits him when the war ends. Yet still he carries on. Almost too bad to be true it defies belief that a civilized bunch like the Germans were capable of such horror.It will break your heart but watch it.

A well-intentioned failure, but a failure nonetheless
The Grey Zone is another well-intentioned failure to add to the canon of Holocaust cinema. On one level you feel bad for criticizing a sincere effort, but on the other when a film with this subject matter (the revolt of the Jewish and Polish Sonderkomandos who ran the crematoriums in Auschwitz in return for a few more months of life) doesn't actually make you FEEL, there's definitely something wrong with it. A few of the performances (Steve Buscemi, Daniel Benzali, David Arquette) are excellent, but far too many are inadequate (especially Alan Corduner in a key role) or just plain bad (Harvey Keitel and Bryan O'Byrne's unfortunately comic book Nazis). The dialogue in director Tim Blake Nelson's script, based on his play, is extremely problematic, to put it mildly. Aiming for evasiveness, it often just sounds like bad Beckett or Pinter ("But -", "Of course." "Although - " "I know" "Then..."), with one line often seemingly unrelated to another and badly staged inadvertent momentary pauses where it should have overlapped. But the biggest problem is it's failure to offer much substance or, until the last half hour, much drama. The last 20 minutes do become involving and the ending is genuinely haunting, but the film seems seriously under-developed. The camerawork and editing are superb, however, never overdoing the hand-held camera but conveying a sense of place and atmosphere: without going out of its way to over-explain anything, you get a feeling that these people are in this place trying to survive another day rather than in a movie.