A Stark Reminder of How Evil Operates

Read Time:5 Minute, 11 Second

MOVIE REVIEW
Bullets and Blueberries (DVD)
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Genre: Documentary
Year Released: 2025
Runtime: 1h 30m
Director(s): Erik Nelson
Where to Watch: available now, order your copy here: www.kinolorber.com or www.amazon.com

RAVING REVIEW: The first thing that strikes you about BULLETS AND BLUEBERRIES is how deliberately it avoids dramatizing the Holocaust. The documentary keeps its gaze fixed on something just as unsettling: the photographs taken by the murderers themselves. By framing the narrative around these images, the film strips away the distance that often comes with decades of retelling. It leaves viewers face-to-face with the executions, the pits, and the everyday routines of the perpetrators who documented their own brutality as if it were mundane. This is not a retelling designed to create emotional peaks; it is a record that doesn’t need embellishment to make its point. The result is stark, direct, and deeply difficult, but necessary.

Director Erik Nelson approaches this material with a steady hand. He focuses tightly on the Einsatzgruppen massacres across Eastern Europe, the early phase of the genocide that relied not on industrialized murder but on rifles, shovels, and a horrifying sense of normalcy. By focusing on what came before the camps became the symbol of the killing machine, the film forces recognition of something many people think they understand but rarely confront in such intimate detail: genocide did not begin with gas chambers. It started with men pulling triggers in open fields, forests, ravines, and on the outskirts of small towns, where silence became its own kind of complicity.

The documentary’s structure is deceptively simple. Survivors, historians, investigators, and prosecutors speak candidly about their work, findings, and interpretations, and the film allows their collective knowledge to guide the viewer through the images. The restraint strengthens the impact. Every photo carries more weight because the film refuses to present them as spectacle or manipulation. These aren’t illustrations; they’re evidence.

BULLETS AND BLUEBERRIES also touches on something many documentaries about the Holocaust struggle to capture: the psychology of perpetrators. While it never attempts to humanize them in a sympathetic sense, it does examine how everyday people—farmers, clerks, students—transformed into executioners with disturbing ease. Several experts expand on the notion that evil is rarely cinematic or monstrous in appearance. It is often ordinary, procedural, even bureaucratic. The killers smiled in photos, smoked cigarettes during executions, and organized their killing schedules with the same attitude they might bring to administering local paperwork. This cold normality is a central theme of the film, and it arrives without sensationalism.

Throughout, the documentary also highlights the efforts of those who have dedicated their careers to recovering this history. Historians and archivists discuss how these photos resurfaced, often tucked in personal albums or passed down through families who did not fully understand—or did not want to understand—what they contained. This emphasis on recovery and archiving helps ground the film in both the present and the past. There is a constant reminder that uncovering the truth is not a finished task, but an ongoing responsibility.

The film’s title, BULLETS AND BLUEBERRIES, reflects a chilling juxtaposition: killings carried out in the same spaces where everyday life took place. It speaks to the shared landscapes of violence and normalcy. Villagers harvested crops and raised families while mass graves were dug nearby. The title lingers in your mind because it captures the central idea that atrocity often sits beside the ordinary without interruption.

One of the film’s strongest qualities is its use of testimony to clarify the images without softening them. Historians explain what is being seen, prosecutors contextualize why the evidence matters, and archivists discuss how these materials are preserved and maintained. The voices are calm but unflinching. The documentary never shies away from the specifics of the massacres, but it also avoids turning the testimony into emotional manipulation. Instead, the clarity of the information and the restraint of the speakers allow the images to carry their own force.

There is also an underlying urgency to the film, despite its tone. As time passes, survivors are aging, and firsthand witnesses are passing away. BULLETS AND BLUEBERRIES understands the fragility of memory. It recognizes that photographs taken by the perpetrators may be among the last remaining evidence of the violence. By anchoring the film in these images, Nelson makes a statement of responsibility: we cannot rely solely on living testimony to preserve this history. It must be held in documents, archives, and films like this.

In the context of documentary filmmaking, the film stands out for its refusal to dramatize or soften history. It is rigorous, concentrated, and stripped of emotional shortcuts. Its impact comes not from grand storytelling but from its unblinking use of evidence. BULLETS AND BLUEBERRIES is not a film viewers will revisit often, but it will shape their understanding of early Holocaust violence in lasting ways. Its purpose is not entertainment but clarity. In fulfilling that purpose, it succeeds with a quiet power that demands attention.

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[photo courtesy of KINO LORBER]

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