Screening in conjunction with Life is Beautiful, Schindler’s List was master-entertainer Steven Spielberg’s first foray into historical cinema and his first (and only) Oscar award as Best Director.

Liam Neeson (in a physical and charismatic performance not dissimilar to his Michael Collins) plays the eponymous Oscar Schlindler, a small-time Krakow entrepreneur with an eye to getting rich quick. The opportunity for success presents itself in the form of the Nazi persecution of the city’s Jewish population, dispossessing the business class of their assets and resettling the rest in concentration camps. Only essential labourers are permitted to remain, and hence Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley), accountant and member of the local Jewish Council, becomes the financial brains behind Schlindler’s enamelware plant. Quietly Stern recruits Jews, saving them from deportation to Auschwitz, and turns a large profit for the business. Though at first apparently of the same mind as the Nazi persecutors, Schindler becomes personally involved in the fate of his workers when the odious German commandant Amon Goeth attempts to shut down the factory and deport its employees. Although Schindler makes strenuous efforts to save them, and later others, his motivation remains ambivalent for much of the film, giving the story real depth and credibility. His heroism is of a complicated nature, and is all the more involving, and challenging, as a result.

Director: Stephen Speilberg
USA, 1993
BandW
Drama / Historical / War
195 min