Review of The Most Precious of Cargoes (2024)
Seen in 2025.
When the deep snow in the Polish woods has swallowed the sound of the passing train, a woodcutter’s wife hears another sound: The cry of a baby. It’s wrapped up in a piece of a fine white cloth with blue stripes at the edges. It is the 1940s. The baby’s father knew or suspected where the train would soon arrive, but his experience at Auschwitz will be worse than he imagined.
This film is digitally animated in the style of coloured woodcuts, with heavy black line work for the characters and soft tonal transitions for the skies and the woods. It’s beautiful.
The story is touching at first, but it takes a wrong turn. Compare Shoah (1985) and The Zone of Interest (2023), both of which brilliantly avoid making the subject of the Holocaust banal. The Most Precious of Cargoes falls almost into banality, not only in its direct look at Auschwitz itself, but in the use of a crude moral dichotomy among the Polish characters. One evil woodcutter interferes and a good one throws an axe into the baddie’s chest; a ludicrous action sequence.
I saw this film at the Draken theatre as part of GIFF 2025, the day before the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. It was the same week that oligarch Elon Musk gave two Nazi salutes at the second inauguration of Donald Trump as president of the USA. It was also the same week that Parisa Liljestrand, Sweden’s Minister of Culture, opened GIFF with a speech at Draken implying that cultural subsidies commonly go to criminal gangs, not artists. The festival’s own vignette, produced before Liljestrand’s speech, was an ironic defence of artistic freedom. The vignette ended with this message, in white text on black:
Every time you watch a film at Göteborg Film Festival you take a stand for artistic freedom. Thank you for your disobedience.
There is disobedience and courage in making a film about the Holocaust in a time of fascist resurgence resembling the 1930s. I defend director Michel Hazanavicius’s freedom, but the sudden axe-throwing is not a good plot point, any more than me sitting down to watch a movie is a brave stand. For lack of a long story to tell about the Holocaust, he should have just made a shorter film.
The characters of this film are nameless, as in a folktale. In his concluding narration, Jean-Louis Trintignant defends this specific piece of fiction, which is only as realistic as a folktale, from those who deny that the Holocaust took place in reality. This is done as if the still-important truth, or courage, could somehow improve Hazanavicius’s axe-throwing artistic choices. They don’t. See the film for its beauty, but don’t confuse it with the genocide.