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The Four Sisters: The Hippocratic OathIn a review of Claude Lanzmann’s memoir, Adam Shatz observes that “self-flattery is characteristically Lanzmannian.” This sort of self-regard often manifests itself in interviews that the filmmaker grants to journalists and proved grating indeed in Napalm, a Lanzmann documentary screened as a “Special Presentation” at Cannes in 2017. During a recent trip to North Korea enshrined in Napalm—which offers a cursory look at the historical roots of the hermit kingdom’s totalitarian impulses—Lanzmann emerges as considerably more preoccupied with celebrating his youthful dalliance with a North Korean nurse during an earlier visit in the 1950s as a member of a leftist delegation. With Lanzmann, however, it’s often necessary to swallow a little of his self-aggrandizement in order to appreciate his genuine accomplishments. Contradictions abound inasmuch as his best work, such as the magisterial Shoah, is both formally audacious and historically focused while a minor work like Tsahal,...

Politics drama that upset France’s Front National party to market premiere at Rendez-vous with French cinema.

The French release of Lucas Belvaux’s populist politics drama This Is Our Land (Chez Nous) will go ahead as planned in February and without cuts in the face of fierce criticism from France’s far-right Front National (Fn) party, distributor Jean Labadie of Paris-based Le Pacte has vowed.

The Belgian director’s film has been in the eye of a political storm this week following the release of the first trailer on Dec 30, ahead of its scheduled Feb 22 release.

Le Pacte’s international sales team will hold buyers-only screening at Unifrance’s Rendez-vous with French Cinema in Paris next week. It will get its festival world premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam at the end of this month.

“The film will be released in February as planned and in its current form. There will be...

German artists faced a painful choice under the Nazis. Many fled abroad, driven by ideology or religion; a few resisted. Those remaining had little choice beyond collaboration: Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels’ dictatorial control of German culture, especially cinema, demanded public and private conformity. Usually, Goebbels tolerated a Jewish spouse or off-hand criticism, but occasionally he felt compelled to make an example.

This article briefly profiles two men who became such “examples.” Among the millions killed by Hitler’s regime, it’s easy to overlook individual tragedies. Yet their fates show that fame, wealth and talent were no guarantee against persecution.

Joachim Gottschalk had a promising career (and life) cut tragically short. Born in Calau, Brandenberg in 1904, Gottschalk acted on stage throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Gottschalk married Meta Wolff, a Jewish actress, in 1930; three years later, they had a son, Michael. When the Nazis came to power, Wolff was denied right to work onstage.

★★★☆☆ "Theresienstadt is truly the town Adolf Hitler has gifted to the Jews," claims SS General Knecht (Jindřich Narenta) as he is being shown around the ghetto in Czech director Zbynĕk Brynych's gruelling Transport from Paradise (1963). Presented merely as the Nazi's overseeing an autonomous Jewish community in the appropriated town of Terezín, the film reveals the stifling fear and horror beneath the otherwise smiling façade. Co-written by Asnost Lustig, who survived both the occupation and a concentration camp, the film is often considered both a jewel of the Czech New Wave and of holocaust films and arrives on UK DVD shelves courtesy of Second Run.

Come Oscar season, all cinephiles are ready to campaign for their favorite film. Are you Team Gravity or Team 12 Years a Slave? Jennifer Lawrence or Lupita Nyong’o? While movie fans have likely seen all the big nominees by this point, there are smaller categories where even some film enthusiasts may not be as well-versed. Leading up to the Oscars, EW will tell you all about one often-overlooked category: Best Documentary Short. Come back each day this week for a look at one of the nominees, and impress your Oscar party with your knowledge when the category appears on Sunday’s broadcast.

Oldest known survivor of the Holocaust, who has died aged 110, is the subject of Oscar-nominated film The Lady in Number 6

If a 38-minute documentary, The Lady in Number 6, wins an Oscar next weekend, it will stand as a fitting memorial to its subject, Alice Herz-Sommer. The oldest known survivor of the Nazi concentration camps, who has died aged 110, preferred all her long life to speak of the joy music brought her rather than the horrors she had witnessed in Theresienstadt.

The executive producer of the film, Fredric Bohbot, told Radio 4: "She is the most incredible person I have ever met. I think she had no material desires, she was very curious about everyone and she had no hatred in her. She loved everyone in so many ways."

Interviewed for the film – in which one of her neighbours describes the bliss of sharing the block of flats in...

Return to the Void: Lanzmann Resurrects Murmelstein

Claude Lanzmann’s unfathomable devotion to exposing the truths of the Holocaust is incomparable in the history of cinema. No other filmmaker has devoted his professional career almost entirely to a single topic, say nothing of one so densely despicable. And yet, since the 70s, Lanzmann has been hard at work, totally immersed in research regarding Hitler’s mass extermination of the Jews, and the resulting 9 hour aural history that is Shoah turned out to only be the beginning. The documentarian has returned to the subject with leftovers from his Shoah era interviews in a series of riveting shorter films – Sobibor, Oct. 14, 1943, 4 p.m, The Karski Report and his first feature to focus on Theresienstadt, A Visitor From The Living. Once again, at the age of 87, Lanzmann takes us back to the Nazi staged propaganda town, this time seeking the perspective of Benjamin Murmelstein,...

The Last of the Unjust – Claude Lanzmann

Section: Out of Competition

Buzz: The guy who made Shoah made this. Period.

The Gist: 1975. In Rome, Claude Lanzmann filmed a series of interviews with Benjamin Murmelstein, the last President of the Jewish Council of Elders in the Theresienstadt ghetto in Czechoslovakia, the only “Jewish elder” (according to Nazi terminology) not to have been killed during the war. 2012. Claude Lanzmann, at 87, exhumes these interviews from Rome, returning to Theresienstadt, the town “given to the Jews by Hitler”, a so-called model ghetto, but a deceitful ghetto chosen by Eichmann to dupe the world. Through the various periods, from Nisko in Poland to Theresienstadt, and from Vienna to Rome, the film provides an unprecedented insight into the genesis of the Final Solution.

Children's author and illustrator best known for Where the Wild Things Are

Maurice Sendak, who has died aged 83, was both one of the most individual and one of the most successful illustrators of the 20th century. Since 1951 his 90-odd titles have sold nearly 30m copies in the Us alone. His renowned work Where the Wild Things Are (1963), with worldwide sales of more than 19m, was a turning point not only in his own career but in the history of children's books.

The bulk of his work lay in illustrating other writers, but it was his own, far fewer, books which brought him countless international awards and academic honours, and made him the subject of many a thesis. At first, Where the Wild Things Are and its follow-up, In the Night Kitchen (1970), caused outraged shock at their robust portrayal of children's fears and aggression; Sendak's fantasy was always "rooted 10ft deep...

The Last Flight of Petr Ginz

Directed by Sandra Dickson and Churchill Roberts

USA, 2012

An old adage stipulates how history is written by the winners, so it’s extremely rare when it’s told by someone who has suffered the ultimate loss. Not since Anne Frank has there been such a deeply affecting postmortem autobiography, but in The Last Flight of Petr Ginz, the story of a vivacious 14-year old boy from Prague is just as poignant and tragic. As well as being an astute condemnation of fascist depravity, the fleetingly short life of Petr Ginz also highlights the best qualities and examples of what it means to be human.

When Petr, an avid admirer of the works of Jules Verne, was just 14, he had already written five novels and kept a diary chronicling the Nazi occupation of Prague. By 16, while interned in the Theresienstadt Ghetto, he had produced more than 170 drawings and paintings,...

Stupéfiants (1932) is interesting in itself, to a moderate degree. It's even more interesting for the lives around it, but more of that later.

Yes, the title literally means "stupefiers," and it's a drug drama, a French-German co-production delivering German thriller entertainment with a Gallic lightness of touch. The hero, Jean Murat, is the kind of energetic superman beloved of the German cinema of the era, with some of the agility that distinguished Roland Toutain in L'Herbier's crime romances of the period—one moment where he swings from a crane adds a welcome dash of Doug Fairbanks excitement to the proceedings: one watches keenly for the rest of the movie in case he repeats it, but sadly he doesn't.

Murat's sister has become addicted to drugs, and Murat embarks on his adventures first to save her, then to avenge her. Along the way, the movie delivers some surprisingly accurate behavior from the addict,...