Bedrock

The history beneath it all
In Poland, the traces of the Holocaust are not confined to museums or memorials. They exist amongst everyday life: through homes, roads, hospitals, football pitches and villages. Bedrock guides us into these places and introduces us to the people who live with this history every day.

Ordinary life has grown around former concentration camps and mass graves, but the past has not disappeared. Children visit friends in homes that were once part of a concentration camp hospital. Football fans celebrate a victory in the village of Birkenau. A Jewish man searches for and preserves the remains of Holocaust victims, still scattered across Poland decades later. Elsewhere, a family debates their hometown’s responsibility for wartime pogroms ahead of its annual commemoration.

The documentary quietly observes how people live with genocide, loss and responsibility from one generation to the next. It is woven into the landscape and into everyday life, where the past and present inevitably exist side by side.