In “The Maelstrom”, Péter Forgács depicts the everyday life of a family of Dutch Jews, which was almost completely shattered during the Nazi Holocaust of World War II. Using the video diary kept in the ‘30s and ‘40s by Max Peereboom, one of the family members, as a starting point, the film includes sequential moments of happiness and of relaxation that are exclusively explained or introduced with the support of inserts and recomposed sounds, rendering the level of dramatic tension non-existent from a visual perspective. Tibor Szemzõ’s music, based on jazz rhythms, has the lightheartedness of Max Peereboom’s images, while at the same time being interspersed with more somber echoes, meant to foreshadow the tragic destiny of this group of people who didn’t seem to grasp — not even on the eve of their departure to the concentration camps of Auschwitz — what was soon to happen to them. Perhaps the most stirring aspect of the documentary is the analogy it establishes with the everyday life of another family, that of Reichskomissar Arthur Seyss-Inquart, in charge of implementing Nazi policies in the German occupied Dutch territory. By all accounts, there hardly seem to be any differences separating the daily existence of the two families, and yet, without ever having met or crossed paths, one of them will have a substantial role to play in the other’s destruction. (Andrei Rus)