Four Films After Shoah (1997-2013) [Masters of Cinema - Eureka!]

Director: Claude Lanzmann
Writers: Claude Lanzmann
Stars: Simon Srebnik, Michael Podchlebnik, Motke Zaïdl

Over a decade in the making, Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour-plus opus is a monumental investigation of the unthinkable: the murder of more than six million Jews by the Nazis. Using no archival footage, Lanzmann instead focuses on first-person testimonies (of survivors and former Nazis, as well as other witnesses), employing a circular, free-associative method in assembling them. The intellectual yet emotionally overwhelming Shoah is not a film about excavating the past but an intensive portrait of the ways in which the past is always present, and it is inarguably one of the most important cinematic works of all time.



The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present – for the first time on DVD in the UK – Claude Lanzmann's four films that he made as follow-ups to his landmark Shoah, each of which explore in further depth specific aspects and events of the Nazis' extermination programme.

A Visitor from the Living \ Un vivant qui passe (1999) is based on an interview conducted by Lanzmann with Maurice Rossel during the filming of Shoah. A member of the Berlin delegate for the International Committee of the Red Cross from 1942, Rossel was the only member of the organisation to have visited Auschwitz in 1943, and to have also paid a trip to the "model ghetto" of Theresienstadt in June 1944.


Sobibór, October 14, 1943, 4PM (2001) recounts the prisoner uprising that took place in the Sobibór death camp in Poland. Only 50 prisoners ultimately evaded capture, while the rest were sent to their murders in the gas chamber.


The Karski Report \ Le rapport Karski (2010) is Lanzmann's brief film on Jan Karski, the Polish resistance figure who also featured in the final section of Shoah, and which recounts Karski's powerful testimonial given to Franklin D. Roosevelt and Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter on what he witnessed during a trip to the Warsaw Ghetto and to the extermination camp Belzec.


The Last of the Unjust \ Le dernier des injustes (2013), at 218 minutes in length, moves between 1975 and 2012, detailing Lanzmann's mid-'70s Rome interviews with Benjamin Murmelstein, the last President of the Jewish Council in the Theresienstadt ghetto, and the filmmaker's own return to the location 37 years later — providing an unprecedented insight into the genesis of the "Final Solution".






Film Distributor: Masters of Cinema - Eureka!

Extras DVD1:
- None





Extras DVD2:
- None




All thanks to the original uploader