Tournées Fest: "Shoah: Four Sisters"

The late Claude Lanzmann’s towering documentary film Shoah, an examination of the Nazi extermination of Eastern European Jews, is that rare film both to have defined our understanding of a historical period and to have set a formal model for how to deal with the unthinkable in cinematic terms. Over the eleven years that he was making Shoah, Lanzmann conducted interviews with many witnesses who were not included in the final cut and whose testimony was used as the material for later films focusing on specific aspects of the Holocaust. (...) In a time of rising anti-Semitism and generalized outbursts of intolerance, the eyewitness accounts to atrocity in Four Sisters are simply essential viewing, as a way to understand both the past and the present—the film’s great underlying theme is the foundation of Israel—and to arm ourselves for a better future.