IMDb > Amen. (2002)
Amen.
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Amen. (2002) -- Trailerfan.com - Trailer (Flash)

Overview

User Rating:
7.4/10   4,821 votes
MOVIEmeter: ?
Down 10% in popularity this week. See why on IMDbPro.
Director:
Costa-Gavras
Writers:
Costa-Gavras (writer)
Jean-Claude Grumberg (writer)
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Contact:
View company contact information for Amen. on IMDbPro.
Release Date:
27 February 2002 (France) more
Genre:
Drama | War more
Plot:
During WWII SS officer Kurt Gerstein tries to inform Pope Pius XII about Jews being sent to concentration camps. Young Jesuit priest Riccardo Fontana gives him a hand. full summary | add synopsis
Plot Keywords:
more
Awards:
2 wins & 8 nominations more
NewsDesk:
It’s Back to School for Haneke
 (From ioncinema. 27 April 2008)

User Comments:
Gavras film is an excellent depiction from a unique point of view more (43 total)

Cast

  (Cast overview, first billed only)
Ulrich Tukur ... Kurt Gerstein

Mathieu Kassovitz ... Riccardo Fontana

Ulrich Mühe ... Doctor
Michel Duchaussoy ... Cardinal
Ion Caramitru ... Count Fontana
Marcel Iures ... Pope

Friedrich von Thun ... Gerstein's Father
Antje Schmidt ... Mrs. Gerstein
Hanns Zischler ... Grawitz

Sebastian Koch ... Höss
Erich Hallhuber ... Von Rutta
Burkhard Heyl ... Director
Angus MacInnes ... Tittman
Bernd Fischerauer ... Bishop von Galen
Pierre Franckh ... Pastor Wehr
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Additional Details

Also Known As:
Amen (France)
Der Stellvertreter (Germany)
Eyewitness
Le vicaire (France) (working title)
more
Runtime:
132 min
Color:
Color
Aspect Ratio:
1.85 : 1 more
Sound Mix:
DTS | Dolby Digital
Filming Locations:
Bucharest, Romania more
Company:
Canal+ more

Fun Stuff

Trivia:
The Vatican did not give a permission to shoot the film in their buildings. After searching a scenery of adequate size for the scenes taking place in the Vatican, Costa-Gavras finally chose Europe's largest building, the House of the People (Casa Poporului) in Bucharest. Some of the outdoor scenes were shot in Mogosoaia Palace, some fourteen kilometers northwest of Bucharest. more
Goofs:
Factual errors: In one of the scenes they say that the Treblinka camp is out of gas, referring to Zyklon B. Treblinka didn't use Zyklon B, instead they used carbon monoxide. more
Quotes:
Karl: In these heroic times, have you acquired some title or some kind of rank?
Kurt Gerstein: Lieutenant of the Waffen-SS.
Karl: Go to the SS Transportation Department. Thanks for your visit.
more

FAQ

This FAQ is empty. Add the first question.
40 out of 49 people found the following comment useful.
Gavras film is an excellent depiction from a unique point of view, 14 November 2002
Author: rd350c from Pittsburgh, USA

I think I am the first person from the USA to comment on this film. We saw it as part of the Pittsburgh Filmmakers festival. There were only maybe 50 people at the screening we attended, and there were only two screenings. This is so unfortunate.

This is an excellent film, and exemplifies, I think, the role of the arts in raising society's level of conscience and effecting social change. It galls me that a mind set is growing, (sixty years later) that refutes the occurrence of the holocaust. All the pictures, names and movie footage in the world will never change these people's minds; convincing them is not the issue. But when you take on the large institutions of society, when you make them accountable and demand that they fess up to their inadequacies, and that they not allow it to happen again, then you get the kind of permanent, positive change that is not eroded by a capricious shift in the political winds.

The amazing thing about this film was the powerful effect it achieved with very little, if any, shocking footage. We are conditioned to look away from all the "standard" holocaust images - the drawn faces, the gaunt skeletons, the bones in the ovens, the piles of shoes and personal effects. Instead, Gavras uses Gerstein's involvement with the engineering side of the issue, and paints a chilling picture of the magnitude of the killings. The project management meetings where they discuss the efficiency improvement strategies for gassing people and cleaning out the chambers are eerily similar to meetings I and many other Dilbert-types attend on a regular basis. The final scene at the camp where all the SS facilities officers chorus their concerns over decreased KILLING efficiency is ridiculously chilling. These guys could be whining about their bottom line numbers at a board meeting for any major corporation.

Gavras hammers home the numbers with the repeated scenes of empty trains going and full trains coming - and you never see a person in the full ones, only closed doors. Think about the numbers. A million people a year is nearly three thousand a day. Instead of making his point with stark images, the way so many other films have, Gavras keeps hammering the shear logistics, the size of the camps, the amounts of the gas needed, the HUGE numbers of people that had to be transported. Think of how big a train with a thousand people is - that's over three times the capacity of the biggest airliners. Gerstein's confrontation with his old friend, the transportation officer, points out how people could vilify certain nazis (SS and Gestapo), and yet remain conveniently ignorant of their own complicity.

The Vatican issued a watered down apology in 1998, admitting partial culpability and asking forgiveness. There are still many who believe that the diplomatic tightrope the Vatican walked was the best course. The conversation between Cardinal Maglione and the German ambassador is accurately taken directly from the Vatican archives. But Gavras makes a valid case that the arguments against outing the German killing machine were weak. That other protests had yielded positive results (look up the 1943 Rosenstrasse uprising) and that the motivations for not acting more decisively were based in part on anti-Semitism, along with diplomatic prudence.

Gavras trys to show that many people who could have acted knew all the facts and chose not to act. I remember, around the time Gavras' released "Z", how the protesters at the 1968 democratic national convention chanted "THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING. THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING!" It didn't matter then, and Gavras makes the case that it didn't matter during the holocaust; the political powers of the world move at their own pace.

Now, sixty years later, we have the last of the actual participants dying off. WWII veterans here in the USA are dying at a rate of 1500 a day, and their ranks are dwindling. There are fewer and fewer left to tell the story or be held accountable. It is incumbent on us, however, to uncover the cover-ups, identify the systems or methods that allowed such atrocities to happen, and make the changes in our society's structure to ensure they don't happen again. Gavras' film effectively does this. Like the principals in the film, we now know the real story. Like the principals in the film, how we act with this knowledge will be judged by future generations.

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Message Boards

Discuss this movie with other users on IMDb message board for Amen. (2002)
Recent Posts (updated daily)User
some one pls explain the ending to me i got confussed on what happened rileymckenna
Should be in every Christian's movie library Shannon-32
Church's role in the Holocaust....(for skeptics and believers alike) Mr_Geppetto
Much superior to 'Schindler's List', 'The Pianist'. panchaud
'The Lives of Others'? davidinberlin
What it seemed to me jhalm424
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