Dir. Hans Hochstöger - 86min - 2021 - Austria

'Endphase' tells the story of one of the last massacres of the Second World War. On the night of May 2, 1945, less than a week before the end of the war, 228 Jewish women, children and old men from Hungary were murdered in the small Austrian community of Hofamt Priel by perpetrators unknown to this day.

Remembrance work often fails for fear of making enemies in one’s region. That is why those born later must have the courage to ask uncomfortable questions. In the Lower Austrian town Hofamt Priel, filmmaker and photographer Hans Hochstöger does, and he shoots a documentary film that will be one of the last of its kind: an oral history project searching for the traces of a nearly forgotten massacre in which contemporary witnesses sketch out their version of memories from 1945. In doing so, he and his brother Tobias, a political scientist, encounter smooth statements from those involved as well as the banality of evil that Hannah Arendt described, but also, fragments of the good. (Daniela Ingruber)