I wanted to get their story out there because I feel like it’s not spoken about enough when World War II is brought up. I felt like my motivation was all those people who were killed, they were kind of just like me. And obviously because I have just the one hand, I’m getting chased down.

“As you watch the film, it focuses on Akiton T4, which is basically killing all people with disabilities. “We looked into it a little bit, what the whole story was about, and we started to understand the size of it,” explains Gibson, who freely admits that, as a fourteen-year-old from rural New South Wales, much of the particulars behind the Nazi regime weren’t exactly on his radar. Set in the countryside of a Germany in the grip of a harsh winter, the film stars newcomer Knox Gibson, a teenager hailing from Orange, who lost part of his arm at the age of three.Ĭonnecting with Ashley Eakin on social media, Gibson produced an audition tape during the pandemic’s first wave of lockdowns, actively pursuing the role of Paul, a young boy whose disability underlies a creeping dread at the Nazi’s disturbing eugenics play. The fear and desperation that many disabled experienced during this dark period is the foundation on which writer director Ashley Eakin has built her latest short film Forgive Us Our Trespasses, now screening on Netflix as part their Emerging Filmmaker initiative. Implemented in 1939, T4 was in effect until Germany’s defeat in 1945, with an estimated 300,000 Europeans falling victim to the campaign. One of the lesser known, and inherently vile policies initiated by the Nazis was the Aktion T4 campaign, a directive of mass murder by involuntary euthanasia of people with disabilities, either congenital, psychiatric or via misfortune. One of today’s great embarrassments is that society still has to decry Nazis as being utterly contemptable.

Forgive us our trespasses movie