Austerlitz. 2016. Written and directed by Sergei Loznitsa

Austerlitz. 2016. Germany. Written and directed by Sergei Loznitsa. DCP courtesy Atoms & Void. In English, German; English subtitles. 94 min. W. G. Sebald was inspired to write his last novel, Austerlitz, in 2001 after watching a BBC television program about the Kindertransport titled “Whatever Happened to Susi?” A story of family secrets and historical erasure, memorialization and forgetting, Sebald’s novel in turn inspired Sergei Loznitsa to offer his own meditations on these themes in his eponymous film study of a contemporary concentration camp museum. Observing the rituals of visitors at a former Nazi death camp, many of them dutifully dragged there in school groups and tourist packages to seize just one more photo op, Loznitsa reflects on the potency and meaning of Holocaust remembrance, which with every passing generation threatens to fade into obscurity, irrelevance, or commodification. The tourists’ T-shirts seem to say it all: “Today is your lucky day,” “Jurassic Park,” “F**kin’ problems,” “Cool story, bro.”