Purity Beats Everything

Director: Jon Bang Carlsen
Producers: Marianne Christensen & Jon Bang Carlsen
Produced by: C & C Productions with support from Danish Film Institute and in association with DR & YLE
Duration: 52 min.
Year of Production: 2007
Original Title: Purity Beats Everything
Silver Wolf competition, IDFA 2007

Purity Beats Everything is about growing up in a thatched silence in an idyllic country neighbouring Germany. And the uneasy silence that reveals itself as the absence of truth about ones own culture’s involvement with the incomprehensible evil that stems from trying to "purify" other cultures. By following the tale of two Auschwitz survivors who fled to South Africa, the film leads us into a devastating past that leads straight into our future. They talk about their fears during the war and about the incomprehensible horrors of Auschwitz, but they also reflect on their new home country and the new role they were given. Once in South Africa, they became members of the white upper class and they had to live side-by-side with oppressors. But can one compare Apartheid to the Holocaust? Acclaimed director Jon Bang Carlsen weaves his own day-to-day life and his own memories into the stories of these individual fates.