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Is there a Holocaust industry? According to KZ, a documentary about a former Nazi concentration camp at Mauthausen, Austria, there is and it's not necessarily a bad thing. Following tourists and tour guides as they make their way around the camp - taking pictures in the gas chambers and hitting the McDonalds drivethru in the town - filmmaker Rex Bloomstein's quietly powerful doc uncovers the importance of remembering the past and the toll that such remembrance takes on the living.

Working without voiceover, titles or re-enactments, Bloomstein doesn't aim to offer a history of the camp. Instead, he's fascinated with the emotional and psychological impact that these places still have. One tour guide is an alcoholic, his 9-5 job almost too much for him too bear. Another, younger guide affects the look of a concentration camp inmate (shaved head, drab clothes) and stages his tours like shock performance art. One schoolgirl faints, all pay attention. Later we learn the guide's grandfather was a member of the SS.

"MORE HOPE THAN HATRED"

Bloomstein never comments, never moralises. His subjects - including townsfolk who lived through the Nazi era - talk directly to camera. Sometimes their comments are chilling, like the aging SS widow who describes her "beautiful" wedding in the camp registry office; or the man who defends the execution of Jews, Communists and gays because "they were a lost cause". Yet, as the camp closes for the night, there's more hope than hatred: giggling school kids have left sober and reflective and a young Kurdish girl has asked her father how to spell "peace" and written it in the guestbook.