Each year, more than 2 million visitors come to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum. If we usually go to a museum to see or contemplate, here, it is a void that we come to apprehend, imagine and try to understand. An abysmal void left by the disappearance of more than a million souls in this place. Over a million human beings relentlessly exterminated, gone up in smoke and vanished forever. By the act of men like us.
With this film, I wish to show how a classic visit of the Auschwitz museum - with its well-oiled mechanics, its fast pace and cacophony - hides a more metaphysical issue for the visitor: that of an interior confrontation with nothingness, self-denial, death and with the dark part that is in each of us. I also want to show how visitors, consciously or unconsciously, with their simple and sometimes clumsy words, express this inner upheaval that the visit causes in them. How also others, on the contrary, refuse this introspective work and try to protect themselves by starting pointless conversations. And how, in the end, all of this reveals something about the very nature of human being.