Night Will Fall

This is a miraculous film...miraculous in that it exists, but more than even that; miraculous in it's unadulterated depiction of the worst of humanity in wartime.

The dichotomy of war is depicted here. In Bergen-Belsen we see life struggling to be what life is and just feet away from piles of death as the corps were strewn. How can these two depictions of life occur so physically close? Only in the worst of war can such atrocities be present, if diversely repugnant. See this film and only trust your moral center as everything must be judged by inherent good.

The old adage that we are doomed to repeat history unless we learn from it comes to heart. Right now we have ISIS, a modern day Nazi style faction. Can we sit idly by and let evil fester. This film makes it clear that the cost will only exponentially multiply if good men sit by and do nothing. See this, weep for those lost at the hands of evil in the past, and renew your resolve that we must stand for good at this later day time where evil once more rears a powerful head.

This has made me think of something that never occurred to me watching other documentaries of the holocaust. These tragic victims were disposed of without ceremony or dignity; each was an individual and when we think of the unthinkable events of this time the numbers of victims are too enormous to encompass, I mourn them all and yet as one person I cannot do enough to honour to six million. Could there be some way that we could have a worldwide movement to have individuals adopt one victim - if possible to know their birthday and date of death, to undertake to honour that one person in whatever way they might honour a friend or relative who had died. As one reviewer said this is about Jewish people but also intellectuals, homosexuals, gypsies - if six million people across the world were all honouring and remembering one of the victims, as time passes might we not do more to prevent night from falling again.

I saw a documentary on this on TV some time back and bought the video expecting to see the actual remastered film in its entirety. Sadly its not there. Where is it? We are told of how the Imperial War Museum has obtained and restored the film and I was expecting to see it here. Without it, this is simply a documentary, albeit an extremely good one. The content itself is moving, harrowing and essential viewing if we are to learn from the atrocities of the past. I can't fault the quality and content of the documentary itself or the extra features. But to see the actual film as had been originally commissioned would have been even more powerful a message.

As above, a factual and irrefutable documentary about the appalling conditions experienced in concentration camps, and the simply dreadful outcome suffered by so many of those who were interned.

The scenes were graphic and disturbing, and if they seem repetitive, then that is because the atrocities were so commonplace. It was not a performance, the film is a factual record, thus the purpose in making it was to educate those who want to know the truth, not to entertain anyone.

As the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz fell this week, I felt that this film serves to help educate all of us who who were not even born at the time of such events. To help us understand the depths of depravity that mankind is capable of, to help us to understand the dreadful consequences of any kind of racism and to remind us that it shouldn't be necessary to have a war to draw allies together (how many people are aware that a staggering 26M Russians were killed in the process of defeating the Nazis?)

A monumental and depressing work, brought together as a lesson to us all that this must never happen again

The footage shown in this documentary is really excruciating... And it goes on and on and on. The film never really shies away from showing you the horrors of hundreds and hundreds of dead bodies in concentration camps being dragged across and piled up one of top of the others as if they were just mannequins. It's a nightmare-inducing vision that I don't think I will ever be able to erase from my memory. Mountain of personal objects, spectacles even human hair carefully sorted according to type and colours.

And yet after a while I felt it was all beginning to be a little too much and I thought the film was probably going around in a circle and did not really have a lot more to say other than just showing detail over detail of the horror. Not that there is anything to say about the carnage that took place in those places, but somehow I felt this was probably a 40/50 minutes or so film stretched to 1 hour and 15 minutes. Yes the footage found is an incredible discovery and a terrifying testimony of a past that shouldn't be forgotten, but other than that, the film has very very little else to say. I also felt some of the use of the interviewees was a bit heavy-handed: cut to people staring into the void, or the use of pointless bit of dialogue just for the sake of seeing this people breaking down into tears half way through the phrase... There wasn't really any need for that. The original footage was heartbreaking enough without having to resort to people crying to make us the audience feel sad about it... or to dark ominous music. But that's just a question of taste. It's hard to review a documentary like this. Give it a small rating and you can be accused of being insensitive. But that's when you should really make a distinction between the subject matter and the material being shown and the actual craft of the documentary. The later is rather plodding, uneven, and as I said before a bit heavy-handed, but since the subject matter is so powerful, on balance 7 out 10 is perfectly justifiable.