A rare insight into the making of “Shoah”
‘Shoah’ is a gruelling nine-and-a-half-hour-long documentary about the Holocaust, with secretly filmed footage of former Nazi officers and interviews in which survivors relive their experiences of the Holocaust.
Jason Di Rosso finds out how this controversial and revolutionary documentary was made.
Image: In Shoah, Lanzmann takes a man who drove a train of Jews to Treblinka, and makes him re-experience the journey. (Supplied)
In 1985, after 12 years of gathering footage and interviews, Jewish filmmaker Claude Lanzmann released his epic documentary, Shoah.
Thirty years later, English journalist-turned-filmmaker Adam Benzine wrote, directed and produced the Oscar-nominated short making-of documentary, Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah.
Benzine’s film revolves around a rare interview with Lanzmann, who speaks about the difficulty of making the film, finding survivors willing to speak and the risks involved in secretly interviewing former Nazis.
‘At the time that Claude Lanzmann was making Shoah, nobody was really doing that kind of work,’ Benzine says.
‘People had somewhat read testimonies of the experiences of people in the concentration camps and the death camps, but seeing his film was a total shock.
From ABC Radio National
