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RADICAL EVIL

DAS RADIKAL BÖSE

By Stefan RUZOWITZKY

Documentary - Completed 2014

After winning the Oscar for Best Foreign Film for 'Counterfeiters', Stefan Ruzowitzky asks why normal people become mass murderers. Why decent family fathers end up killing women, children and babies on a daily basis?

- Year of production
- 2014
- Genres
- Documentary
- Countries
- GERMANY, AUSTRIA
- Languages
- GERMAN, ENGLISH
- Duration
- 93 mn
- Director(s)
- Stefan RUZOWITZKY
- Producer(s)
- Wolfgang RICHTER (docMovie)
- Synopsis
- We hear the killers' thoughts as they wrote them down in letters and diaries, we hear what they said at court: Why they did not refuse to execute these horrific orders, how killing became a routine, how they managed to excuse themselves, how they were manipulated by their leaders. It's the blueprint of a genocide.
  A panel of psychologists, historians and genocide experts helps us to understand: among them Benjamin Ferencz, chief prosecutor of the "Einsatzgruppen"-trial in Nuremberg, Christopher Browning, author of the acclaimed Holocaust-study Ordinary Men, Robert Jay Lifton, one of the proponents of "Psychohistory" and the French Père Patrick Debois, tireless researcher of the "Shoah par balles" in the former Soviet-Union.
  Would we have acted differently? How to overcome our readiness for conformity, obedience and violence? Is there individual guilt, if these horrible patterns are all too "human"? How to prevent genocides in the future? RADICAL EVIL is an extraordinary film, a documentary on the one hand but also marked by Oscar®-winning director Stefan Ruzowitzky’s scenic transformations for which the film’s DoP Benedict Neuenfels has developed a unique visual language.