This film has never been shown in Romania. When it premiered, 28 years ago, one could not speak of the Holocaust in Romania. After the end of the golden age, the inter-war period seemed to many a golden era, while others were too busy to balance the Nazi crimes with the communist ones. Time went by, and the Holocaust was never a priority of collective remembering; at most, it was an obligation fulfilled by official statements.
The nine and a half hours of Lanzmann’s film are a physical and emotional experience that can start to compensate this void. There was a lot of talk surrounding the film about the author’s refusal to use archive footage, a commentary and historical documents. Relying only on survivors, on witnesses who revisit the places of genocide, Lanzmann leaves one to imagine what cannot be otherwise represented, an unimaginable horror.
Shoah is not important only because it manages to transmit the experience of extermination, but also because it revolutionized the documentary method. Documentary film has never been the same again after Lanzmann used this radical approach, innovative at the time. Watch it: then you will discover – in many of the films from this year’s selection – echoes of a way to make cinema and to live the memory. And you will look differently at what happens in the world now.