Synopsis
Determined to survive at any price, Edith, a young Jewish woman deported to an extermination camp, manages to survive by accepting the role of kapo, a privileged prisoner whose mission is to ruthlessly guard other prisoners.
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Kapo
Cast
Director
Co-Director
Producers
Writers
Editor
Cinematography
Assistant Directors
Camera Operators
Additional Photography
Production Design
Set Decoration
Composers
Sound
Makeup
Hairstyling
Studios
Countries
Primary Language
Spoken Languages
Alternative Titles
Kapò, A kápó, De Kampopzichter, Капо, קאפו, Kapò - Uma História do Holocausto, 零点地带, 제로지대, کاپو, Kapo - Håndlanger for SS
Genres
Themes
Releases by Date
Premiere
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Italy
Venice Film Festival
Theatrical
27 Sep 1960
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Italy
Digital
16 Oct 2019
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Spain
Physical
20 May 2010
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Netherlands
Releases by Country
Italy
07 Sep 1960
- Premiere Venice Film Festival
27 Sep 1960
- Theatrical
Netherlands
20 May 2010
- Physical
Spain
16 Oct 2019
- Digital
Popular reviews
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Jacques Rivette, "On Abjection"
(Jacques Rivette, "De l'abjection", Cahiers du cinéma, n° 120, June 1961)The least that one can say is that it's difficult, when one takes on a film on such a subject (the concentration camps), not to ask oneself certain preliminary questions; yet everything happens as though, due to incoherence, inanity, or cowardice, Pontecorvo resolutely neglected to ask them.
For example, that of realism: for so many reasons, all quite easy to understand, total realism -- or what serves as realism in cinema -- is impossible here; every effort in this direction is necessarily unachieved (that is immoral), every attempt at reenactment or pathetic and grotesque make-up, every traditional approach to "spectacle" partakes in voyeurism and pornography.…
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A solid reminder of what can happen when ideology dictates behaviour and belief. And to those here who can't fathom how such things could happen? It was filmed in Yugoslavia in which a mere three decades later the same shit repeated itself. This will happen again.
Jacques Rivette described the pan to Emanuelle Riva's electrocuted body as 'abject', and although I feel that appraisal is a little hysterical there is more than a suggestion of melodrama in Pontecorvo's debut.
The first act 'transfer' (from the camp where her parents were to the camp where she becomes Kapo) is ridiculous. Strasberg returns home to see her parents boarding a van to a camp. In her anger and confusion she inadvertently identifies…
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My third Pontecorvo, after Burn and The Wide Blue Road (yes, I still haven't watched The Battle of Algiers). Horrifying to watch at times yet powerful, this is an early Holocaust film about a 14-year-old Jewish girl's attempt to stay alive in a concentration work camp.
It features an astonishing performance by Susan Strasberg (who played the original Anne Frank on Broadway) as Edith who's driven by survival and becomes hardened in the process - taking on the identity of a dead political prisoner to avoid Auschwitz and eventually becoming one of the hated Kapos, the prisoner guards the Nazi employed to keep the others in line.
The film is brutally effective at showing - almost from the start- the…
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☆"You must live. Live, and think of nothing else."☆
Five years before his untouchable masterpiece The Battle of Algiers, director Gillo Pontecorvo was nominated for an Oscar for Kapò. That's a heck of a ride for a man who wanted to be a chemist earlier in life, then made a career as a journalist, and later a documentary filmmaker. That all makes sense for that incredible 1965 docu-hybrid feature, but years earlier Pontecorvo focused on an older event, that of the Holocaust in this audacious film about surviving a Nazi concentration camp.
Teenage Edith (Susan Strasberg) and her Jewish parents are trying to live amidst the Nazi oppression during World War II, but this wealthy family is captured and taken…
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In the same year of release as George Stevens’ The Diary of Anne Frank actress Susan Strasberg (Anne Frank on the Broadway stage, passed over for the film version in favor of Millie Perkins) starred in another gut wrenching Holocaust themed drama, Kapo, a French/Italian co-production helmed by Gillo Pontecorvo (The Battle of Algiers and Burn). A flawed but highly compelling story of a 14 year old Jewish girl from France who while interred in a concentration camp takes on a new identity and renounces her heritage in order to survive. Her compromises begin to mount and she soon finds herself a boss (“kapo”) of one of the work camp huts, giving in to the dark side of human nature…
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With its accomplished fusion of suspense and documentary techniques, The Battle Of Algiers will always stand as Gillo Pontecorvo's major contribution to the history of cinema but even though he produced nothing else to equal it in an inconsistent and non-prolific career, I would argue that this attempt at a realistic Holocaust drama - only his second narrative feature - is a powerful depiction of a difficult subject which came out at a time when filmmakers were still reluctant to show the horrors that had been perpetrated in the Nazi death camps.
The American Susan Strasberg's casting as the prisoner charged with keeping her fellow inmates in line may on the surface seem a strange one but it's less so…
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Da Abjeção (*)
por Jacques Rivette
O mínimo que podemos dizer é que é difícil, ao realizar um filme sobre este tema (campos de concentração), não colocar certas questões preliminares; mas tudo acontece como se, por incoerência, estupidez ou covardia, Pontecorvo tivesse negligenciado resolutamente em colocar estas questões.Por exemplo, aquela do realismo: por várias razões, fáceis de compreender, o realismo absoluto - ou o que serve como realismo no cinema - é impossível de se colocar aqui. Toda investida que vai a esta direção é necessariamente inalcançada (portanto imoral), qualquer tentativa de reconstrução ou maquiagem ridícula e grotesca, qualquer abordagem tradicional do “espetáculo” acaba sendo apenas voyeurismo e pornografia. O diretor é obrigado a suavizar, para que o que…
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An early holocaust/concentration camp fictional film, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, that steers the always tricky path between the dramatic and the realistic in such films. I think it does a pretty good job aided by some committed acting from the mostly female cast.
The portrayal of the lead character as a 'good girl' who after the survival instinct kicks in becomes 'not a good girl' contrasts with the more common one, and Susan Strasberg is excellent as a Jewish teenager who is helped to change her identity in order to survive.
It's a brutal and powerful film that does not shy away from the atrocities that took place in these camps and tries to show how humans might react in such unimaginable circumstances. -
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From the director of BATTLE OF ALGIERS, a brutal and unflinching look at Nazi concentration camps and one woman selling her soul to rise above it... that happens to unfortunately features a love story pop up halfway through.
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Beneath watchtowers, surrounded by an electric fence, starving, sleep deprived, and worked like beasts, solidarity is the first thing to die. In the camps, the only objective is to survive, but the camps were designed with this in mind. If you think only of your survival, comfort, or privilege, there can be no unity, and no meaningful resistance. Honest girls go from sharing their meals to stealing others', and even political prisoners are reduced to their basest impulses just to stay alive. By viewing the Holocaust through such a (neo-)realistic lens, Pontecorvo depicts when and how prisoners could escape, overwhelm, or effectively sabotage, but ultimately how a few small enforcers can exterminate the hope that could spark such a fire. In addition to a tense, sharply photographed evocation of history, it is a sociopsychological inspection of prisons—those on both sides of the power structure—that has remained relevant from its release to this day.
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