Hope Dies Last
2017 · 8m
Directed by Ben Price
Genres: biography, drama, historical
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
In Auschwitz, prisoner-barber Józef Paczyński must cut the hair of the camp commandant while concealing what the work is doing to him.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects the Holocaust short to be about unspeakable suffering, so Price just... doesn't show it—the horror lives in a barber's hands and what they're *not* allowed to feel. It's restraint as provocation, which is smarter than another trauma spectacle.
The precision of this film sits squarely in a lineage of witness cinema that trusts formal discipline over emotional catharsis; the act of cutting hair becomes a meditation on complicity and survival that recalls the compositional rigor of Haneke or Chbosky—a short that earns its silence.
The entire film hinges on Price's decision to make the barber's hands the protagonist, letting the audience read the internal collapse through micro-movements and breath while the dialogue stays locked in careful protocol—one technical choice that transforms what could've been a history lesson into something visceral.