Ava DuVernay and Other Directors Rethink Holocaust Films

In the British comedy “Extras,” Kate Winslet, who appears as a version of herself, is playing as a nun in a film about the Holocaust. When commended for using her platform to bring attention to the atrocities, she replies callously, “I’m not doing it for that. I mean, I don’t think we really need another film about the Holocaust, do we?” She explains that she took the role because if you do a movie about the Holocaust, you’re “guaranteed an Oscar.”

The fictional Winslet’s perspective on movies about the Holocaust, though obviously a joke in the context of that 2005 episode, has become something of a prevailing opinion. Since Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” (1993) won best picture and six other Academy Awards nearly 30 years ago, Holocaust films from “Life Is Beautiful” (1998) to “Jojo Rabbit” (2019) have been seen as Oscar bait. Well intentioned or not, they are considered the kind of cinema you should but don’t necessarily want to see, meant to tug at heartstrings and win their creators prizes.

In fact, Winslet herself proved that theory correct when she won the best actress Oscar in 2009 for “The Reader,” in which she played a woman who served as an SS guard at Auschwitz. At the ceremony, the host, Hugh Jackman, built a musical moment around the fact that he hadn’t seen “The Reader,” a gag that got a roar of knowing laughter from the audience: Movies about the Holocaust are important, yes, but skippable.

But maybe the notion of the Holocaust movie is changing. This year in particular, three films seek to challenge the idea of what it can and should be. All of them turn an analytical eye on their subject matter, linking the horrors of the past to the present, in that way making the subject feel as upsettingly resonant as ever.