Review of Amnesia

A post-holocaust movie set in Ibiza, and without any holocaust stuff at all. Young German DJ/producer moves to Ibiza for his career, finds himself living next door to an older woman who [SPOILER ALERT] turns out to be a German who refuses to speak the German language because of what happened to her young Jewish love during the war. They develop a relationship (which he thinks is romantic love, but she knows better) but it's all thrown into turmoil when his mother and much-loved grandfather come to visit, causing everyone to re-examine their pasts and the stories they tell about it.

It's beautiful, and Ibiza looks stunning, and even the clubs (especially the one called Amnesia - geddit?) look great. I'm afraid I was a bit annoyed by a film that focused on the holocaust from the perspective of how it felt to people who were either perpetrators (the grandfather, portrayed by Bruno Ganz, who has told various conflicting stories about his role as a 'rescuer') or who were...well, what is my issue here? She lost a loved one. Does that make her, a non-Jewish German who was herself never under threat but fled to Switzerland, a holocaust survivor?

I've been critical of other holocaust films before which focus on the experience of German and Austrian Jews...do I subconsciously think that the holocaust was only about what happened to 'my' people, the Jews of Poland and Eastern Europe that were the object of the explicit policy of extermination? Maybe I do...

Aside from that this is not a bad film and worth watching. We watched on Netflix, on our new TV  but via Chromecast rather than via the native Netflix support...slightly easier to manage...