Please, watch this in a cinema.

I absolutely agree. Watching this film in a theater is a visceral experience. This is a masterpiece that must be felt on a large screen.

I agree too.

Thanks, i think i will!!

Won't be playing at any cinemas near me, so I will have to watch it at home when it comes out.

I agree! This movie will ONLY have the exhausting impact if seen in a cinema. There were only four people in my showing. A woman three seats down kept breathing deeply throughout the film. Heavy sighs. I thought she was bored, which kind of shocked me. When the lights came up she admitted she was having trouble breathing. I was having the same experience! I've never seen a movie so personal and claustrophobic. I felt exhausted. The impact of the film hit me on the way home and I started sobbing in my car.

Now that you mentioned The Witness and Taxidermia, I recommend you another great Hungarian movie: Forest (2003). Please watch it 

I was looking back to see if you were looking back at me to see me looking back at you

You are probably right, but this film only showed in one theatre anywhere near me and it only ran for one weekend and I saw Rabin, The Last Day instead. I was feeling nostalgic for a former, favorite professor. That theatre is also some distance away from me, and I considered seeing them both in the same day, but I knew the collective content was too heavy, and no, I am not even Jewish.

I have finally seen it on DVD, I think the film’s greatest merit from an historical sense is the first scene with the gas chamber.

The steady assurances from the Germans that they were looking for workers, nurses, teachers….they had positions for all types of craftsman….come see me after the showers…..They even provided hooks with numbers on them to give the impression that people would be coming back out to reclaim their own clothes….

The vaults shut, then banging then more banging, at one point it sounded like a train, and then the noise just faded away.

Those techniques were actually used in some camps, particularly the ones where they were afraid of mass rebellion. The same type of cajoling was often employed when they evacuated people from the ghettos.

I cannot recall another film that captures that technique quite so well. I teach as an adjunct instructor of history when I can find a placement in the evenings, I would consider using that clip when the time comes for the Holocaust lecture.

I watched it at home and really wished that I had seen it at the theater ... but only at a time when there were just a few people in there. I am sure it would have hit me much harder.