Directors: Tor Ben-Mayor, Dan Setton | Countries: Israel / Germany / Italy | Runtime: 56 min | Language: Hebrew, German, English | 🏆 International Emmy Award — Best Documentary (2000)
Synopsis
Kapo confronts one of the most painful and least-discussed chapters of the Holocaust: the Jewish prisoners who were appointed by the Nazis to supervise their fellow inmates in the ghettos and concentration camps. The word “kapo” — derived from the Italian for “head” or “chief” — came to stand for an impossible moral position, a place between victim and collaborator where survival itself became a source of lifelong guilt and accusation.
Directors Tor Ben-Mayor and Dan Setton approach this charged subject with rigour and compassion, gathering the testimony of survivors — including, for the first time on film, Jewish women who served as functionaries in Auschwitz-Birkenau. The film refuses easy judgement, instead asking how anyone can be held morally responsible for choices made under the absolute terror of the camps.
Through the voices of those who lived it — and those who judged them afterward, in Israel’s postwar courts and communities — Kapo becomes a meditation on memory, blame, and the grey zone that Primo Levi described as the moral heart of the camp experience.
Awards & Festival Selections
- International Emmy Award — Best Documentary (2000)
- IDFA — International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam
- Jerusalem Film Festival
- An Israel / Germany / Italy international co-production
Why This Film Matters
Kapo was among the first documentaries to break the silence around Jewish functionaries in the camps — a subject so sensitive that it had remained largely unspoken in Israeli public life for decades. It stands alongside Cinephil’s other Holocaust-memory titles as an essential work on how societies remember, judge, and ultimately try to understand the unthinkable.
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