Ahead of the Academy Awards, we’re reviewing each short category. See the Documentary section below and the other shorts sections here.
Body Team 12 – Liberia – 13 minutes
For Americans the Ebola scare was a handful of cases and nurses who weren’t as careful as they should have been. To the world it was thousands upon thousands of dead bodies—loved ones that family members can’t normally mourn because every second the deceased’s blood lays in the streets is an extra second risking greater contamination. It’s easy to forget the scope of epidemics like this when ground zero isn’t in our own backyard. We blame countries for being inferior, rejoice in our capabilities to put a lid on things, and go about our daily business as though nothing is wrong. This isn’t the case for citizens of Liberia where outbreak numbers exploded exponentially. It was a plague destroying their country.
Body Team 12 – Liberia – 13 minutes
For Americans the Ebola scare was a handful of cases and nurses who weren’t as careful as they should have been. To the world it was thousands upon thousands of dead bodies—loved ones that family members can’t normally mourn because every second the deceased’s blood lays in the streets is an extra second risking greater contamination. It’s easy to forget the scope of epidemics like this when ground zero isn’t in our own backyard. We blame countries for being inferior, rejoice in our capabilities to put a lid on things, and go about our daily business as though nothing is wrong. This isn’t the case for citizens of Liberia where outbreak numbers exploded exponentially. It was a plague destroying their country.
- 1/28/2016
- by Jared Mobarak
- The Film Stage
Simply titled the Hebrew word for ‘Holocaust’, Claude Lanzmann’s monolithic collage of memory and mind’s eye elicitation looks at the Nazi’s Final Solution via miraculous first hand accounts and harrowing modern day revisitations to the grounds where millions of Jews were mechanically turned to ash, recasting the unnameable atrocities not as history we ache to suppress, but as a looming inescapable truth that haunts our every experience. After over a decade of endless research and the insurmountable task of locating primary sources willing to speak, Lanzmann emerged from the editing room with a cinematic work that deals directly with death. Rather than delving into the exhaustive shock of archival material or a collection of broad academic reflections, the film instead digs deep into the fine details of exactly how the Nazi’s exterminated the Jews of Europe. Despite its shattering subject matter and mind-boggling length, its unparalleled...
- 7/4/2013
- by Jordan M. Smith
- IONCINEMA.com
He lived a remarkable life: a French resistance fighter, a friend of Jean-Paul Sartre and lover of Simone de Beauvoir. Yet he is best known for his epic film, Shoah, the definitive oral record of those who survived the Holocaust. Now, aged 87, he tells his own extraordinary story
One evening – we are not given a date, but it must be the early 1960s – the great French philosopher, essayist, novelist and pioneer of feminism Simone de Beauvoir was, as so often, at the theatre. But this was a stranger night than most. On De Beauvoir's left sat her lifelong companion and erstwhile lover, the greatest philosopher of his generation and founder of existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre. To her right was her current lover, the writer, former resistance fighter and film director Claude Lanzmann. And on stage: Lanzmann's sister Évelyne, a foremost actress of the day, playing the lead role in Sartre's play Huis Clos.
One evening – we are not given a date, but it must be the early 1960s – the great French philosopher, essayist, novelist and pioneer of feminism Simone de Beauvoir was, as so often, at the theatre. But this was a stranger night than most. On De Beauvoir's left sat her lifelong companion and erstwhile lover, the greatest philosopher of his generation and founder of existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre. To her right was her current lover, the writer, former resistance fighter and film director Claude Lanzmann. And on stage: Lanzmann's sister Évelyne, a foremost actress of the day, playing the lead role in Sartre's play Huis Clos.
- 3/5/2012
- by Ed Vulliamy
- The Guardian - Film News
Claude Lanzmann's Holocaust documentary, Shoah, was meant to be an 'incarnation of the truth'. His new film responds to a threat to that truth
Claude Lanzmann went to Iran recently. "As you know," the 85-year-old director, a Jewish Frenchman, tells me in his Paris office, "Ahmadinejad doesn't believe there was a Holocaust. The Iranians wanted me to prove to them on television that there was. They wanted to see the corpses."
What did he tell them? The director of the nine-and-a-half hour documentary Shoah (1985) about the mass murder of Jews in Nazi death camps swivels round in his chair and fixes me. "I told them there's not a single corpse in Shoah. The people who arrived at Treblinka, Belzec or Sobibor were killed within two or three hours and their corpses burned. The proof is not the corpses; the proof is the absence of corpses. There were special details...
Claude Lanzmann went to Iran recently. "As you know," the 85-year-old director, a Jewish Frenchman, tells me in his Paris office, "Ahmadinejad doesn't believe there was a Holocaust. The Iranians wanted me to prove to them on television that there was. They wanted to see the corpses."
What did he tell them? The director of the nine-and-a-half hour documentary Shoah (1985) about the mass murder of Jews in Nazi death camps swivels round in his chair and fixes me. "I told them there's not a single corpse in Shoah. The people who arrived at Treblinka, Belzec or Sobibor were killed within two or three hours and their corpses burned. The proof is not the corpses; the proof is the absence of corpses. There were special details...
- 6/9/2011
- by Stuart Jeffries
- The Guardian - Film News
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