1985 / France / 542’ / Color / status : completed / long feature-film / International collections
Twelve years in the making, Claude Lanzmann’s monumental epic on the Holocaust features interviews with survivors, bystanders, and perpetrators across 14 countries. The film contains no historical footage; instead, it uses interviews to “reincarnate” the Jewish tragedy and revisits the sites where the crimes occurred. It stemmed from Lanzmann’s concern that the genocide, committed only 40 years earlier, was already fading from memory and that atrocity was being sanitised as history. His monumental work — both epic and intimate, immediate and definitive — is a triumph of form and content, uncovering hidden truths while redefining documentary filmmaking. The film recounts the extermination of six million European Jews during the Second World War and gave the event its name in many countries: the Shoah.
542’ & NEW APPROX 10x 52’ VERSION – 2K FROM A 4K SCAN
The digital print of SHOAH was produced by Why Not Productions, with the support of the Foundation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah and CNC, as well as the participation of IFC Films and the Criterion Collection.
Winner of Flaherty Documentary Award at the BAFTA Awards
Winner of Honorary César at the César Awards
Press
«An extraordinary accomplishment. By far the greatest film ever seen about the genocide of European Jews.»
The New York Times
«A movie of exemplary modernism, an advanced, existential cinema of the highest order.»
The New Yorker
«An indelible mark on the history of cinema.»
The Washington Post
«Perhaps the most important piece of historical cinema we possess.»
Times
«When we see Claude Lanzmann's extraordinary film today, we realise that we knew nothing.»
Le Monde
«Why revisit SHOAH? Because it matters more today, just as it will matter even more in a hundred years, and 200, and a thousand.»
The Boston Globe
«Claude Lanzmann has accomplished the seemingly impossible: He has brought such beauty to his recounting of the horror of the Holocaust that he has made it accessible and comprehensible.»
Los Angeles Times
