Film Screening: Schächten—A Retribution

In Vienna in the 1960s, Victor, a young Jewish businessman, bears witness to an unthinkable miscarriage of justice: the acquittal of the Nazi concentration camp commandant who murdered his mother, sister, and grandparents when he was a child. Reeling from the legal system’s failure to mete out punishment and acknowledge historical facts, and less sanguine about the corrosive antisemitism and historical whitewashing of his Austrian countrymen, Victor resolves to take the law into his own hands. This dynamic, lavishly mounted historical drama about the scars of war and the road to revenge includes the rare depiction of the lives of Austrian Jews in the years following World War II.

Director: Thomas Roth
Austria 2022
DCP, 110 minutes
German with English subtitles

Watch the trailer here.

Co-presented by The National Center for Jewish Film’s Annual Film Festival 2023 (May 7-23)