French documentary film director Claude Lanzman’s last released work before his death in 2018 features previously unreleased interviews with four women from different European countries who survived the holocaust. The accounts were part of the original Shoah project that was released in 1985 but in Lanzman’s opinion seemed to be stories of their own that did not fit easily in the greater narrative of the main frame of the work.
The testimonies of these strong women are moving and horrifying with lots of details about the processes that went on and the certain stages of dehumanization and annihilation of Jewish people at that time. Like in Shoah no historical footage is used and the viewer stays with Lanzman and each woman in the naturalistic moment of the conversation.
A very insightful addition to the essential documentation of the holocaust that the film Shoah already is.
