Country: France, Germany
Duration: 104 min
Genre: Documentary
Director: Christophe Cognet
Screenplay: Christophe Cognet
Producers: Stéphane Jourdain, Jonas Katzenstein
Operators: Sylvain Viricel
Editor: Catherine Zins
Cast: Yehuda Bacon, José Fosty, Walter Spitzer, Samuel Willenberg
Nomination: Competition, To the memory
Age limitations: 12+
This is an unprecedented investigation into the artworks created secretly by inmates in Nazi concentration camps and by survivors after liberation. Through interviews with the small number of living artists who survived the Nazi camps, Because I was a Painter examines the stirring, secretly created images of faces, bodies and landscapes to explore the very notion of art and an artist’s impulse to create, even in the darkest of circumstances. The film confronts notions of beauty and representing the horrors of extermination. Can something created under such circumstances, in such places, ever be beautiful?