Several first-time visitors to the Karlovy Vary festival began their festival experience in a powerful way – with a screening of the over nine-hour documentary Shoah. Claude Lanzmann’s monumental documentary, composed entirely of interviews with direct eyewitnesses of the Holocaust and quiet images of a bucolic landscape where the atrocities occurred, is one of the most important films in history. It is also one of the few cinematographic works included in the UNESCO Memory of the World register.
The documentary began its renewed journey across global festivals in February at the Berlinale. As Léa Daudon, representing distributor MK2, reminded us, this year’s international screenings mark three anniversaries: “Forty years have passed since Shoah premiered in France, eighty years since the end of the Second World War and the liberation of the camps, and in November, it will be one hundred years since the birth of Claude Lanzmann, whose other films are now being restored.”
Festival-goers will have another chance to experience this extraordinary film on the big screen on Saturday 12 July.
