Director: André Singer | Countries: UK / Israel / Denmark | Runtime: 75 min | Executive Producer: Stephen Frears | Narrator: Helena Bonham Carter
Synopsis
In the spring of 1945, as Allied forces liberated the Nazi concentration camps, British, American and Soviet camera crews filmed what they found. Under the supervision of producer Sidney Bernstein — with the editorial involvement of Alfred Hitchcock — the footage was assembled into a documentary intended to confront the world with the full scale of the atrocities: German Concentration Camps Factual Survey. Then, for political reasons, the film was shelved and left unfinished for nearly seventy years.
Night Will Fall tells the extraordinary story of that lost film and its belated completion. Director André Singer combines the original 1945 reels with the testimony of the cameramen who shot them, the survivors who appear in the footage, and the soldiers who liberated the camps — building an unflinching account of how the visual record of the Holocaust came to be, and why it was nearly erased.
The result is both a harrowing historical document and a profound study of the power and responsibility of the documentary image — of what it means to film the unfilmable, and to insist that it not be forgotten.
Festival Selections & Broadcast
- Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale) — Special Screening
- Sheffield Doc/Fest — Premiere
- Telluride Film Festival
- Broadcast on Channel 4 (UK), HBO and international networks
- Released on the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the camps
Press
“A devastating and essential film about the images that defined our understanding of the Holocaust.”
— Variety
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Related Films
- A Film Unfinished — Another unfinished film of the Holocaust and the ethics of the image
- Kapo — The grey zone of the camps, on film
- Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah — Witnessing the Holocaust through testimony