Oscar winning

 Shine box

 By Stanley Kubrick." With interviews featuring major Kubrick scholars, the film explores the long-established argument from critics that the director's 1980 adaptation of Stephen King's The Shining contains a nuanced subtext about American settler colonialism and its connections to the ideology of the Third Reich. 

"Beginning with Raul Hilberg's 1961 publication of The Destruction of the European Jews, one of the founding volumes in Holocaust Studies, Stanley Kubrick grappled with the notion of how to film the Nazi genocide," says director Stewart. "It has been long-established in both the biographical as well as scholarly literature that Kubrick dedicated years to pre-production on a Holocaust film based upon Louis Begley's Wartime Lies. A semi-autobiographical novel, the book follows a pair of upper class Polish Jews, an aunt and nephew, who escape persecution by purchasing 'Aryan Papers' that designate the pair as Catholics. Kubrick was long fascinated with issues of identity and its psychological ambiguities. His planned film, The Aryan Papers, reached the point of preliminary casting and camera testing before being cancelled. Kubrick told his assistant Frederic Rapahel that Steven Spielberg's films on the topic dissuaded him. 'Think that was about the Holocaust? That was about success, wasn't it? The Holocaust is about six million people who get killed. Schindler's List was about six hundred people who don't,' he reportedly told Raphael."

"Regardless of cancelled plans, Kubrick still began to grapple with the Holocaust in his adaptation of The Shining. Unlike the Stephen King novel, Kubrick focuses a tremendous level of emphasis upon the notion of the haunted Overlook Hotel 'being built on an Indian graveyard,' to quote the picture," continued Stewart. "This is a film that repeatedly emphasizes in the background the role of settler colonialism, Indigenous genocide, and chattel bond slavery. Kubrick understood on a deep level the connection between the holocaust of the Indigenes and that of the Jews. Whether it is blood spilling in gallons from elevators or a family getting lost in a wintry hedge maze, neither of which is found in the novel, Kubrick is creating a visual representation of genocide's mechanized reality and dimensions. Modernity's mechanical brutality is the parallel to the banality of its evil and manifestations in historic personages like Adolf Eichmann. Jack Torrance, the ne'er-do-well failed writer and alcoholic, follows a trajectory of corruption akin to the German middle class's embrace of the Nazi Party after the 1929 stock market crash."

The film was directed by Andie Stewart and originally released in 2019.