Night Will Fall

April 1945. In Germany, as World War II was drawing to a close and the Allied Forces were swarming into Berlin, groups of freshly trained combat cameramen documented the gruesome scenes behind the recently liberated Nazi concentration camps. Named "German Concentration Camps Factual Survey", the 1945 documentary for the British government was produced by Sidney Bernstein, with Alfred Hitchcock's participation. For nearly seven decades, the film was shelved in the British archives and was abandoned without a public screening–for either political reasons or shifted Government priorities–to be ultimately completed by a team of historians and film scholars of the British Imperial War Museum, who meticulously restored the original footage. Intertwined with interviews of both survivors and liberators, as well as short newsreel films and raw footage from the original film, the 2014 documentary chronicles the atrocities that occurred in the concentration and labour camps of Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz, Majdanek, Dachau, and Buchenwald, also including footage from Soviet cameramen. Without shying away, the camera pans on the German SS officers, lingering on the bony, emaciated faces of the piled-up-like-dolls bodies of men and women who were mercilessly thrown into pits during the mass-grave digging operations. However–even though the film documents a world of nightmare, exposing the undeniable truth of what has been going on within these camps–it also focuses on the healing process of the completely dehumanised survivors, in an attempt not only to serve as a testimony of the Nazi crimes, but also as an important lesson for all mankind.-Nick Riganas