THE LAST DAYS (M). (The Shoah Foundation/Palace) Documentary Director: James Moll Running time: 95 minutes.
Established by Steven Spielberg in 1994, the non-profit Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation aims to record and document the stories of Holocaust survivors as part of a lasting record for future generations. Spielberg and director James Moll have already produced a couple of award winning tv documentaries. This remarkable and haunting Oscar winning documentary is the first feature film from the Foundation, and depicts the unique Hungarian experience.
In 1945, even when it became obvious that the war was lost, Hitler began a massive campaign to eradicate the Hungarian Jews. He directed enormous resources away from the Russian Front and assigned them the task of moving the Jewish population from the ghettos to the death camps, where they were systematically executed. Culled from intensive research and an exhaustive series of interviews, this moving, powerful and ultimately inspirational documentary tells the story of those horrific last days of the war through the eyes of five survivors.
The five survivors have gone on to lead fulfilling lives, devoted to humanitarian causes, and their inspirational stories deserve to be heard. Tom Lantos is now a US congressman; Renee Firestone is a teacher who educates school children on the Holocaust; artist Alice Lok Cahana uses art as a way of capturing her experiences; while businessman Bill Basch and Irene Zisblatt continue to share their experiences. Although they come from different backgrounds, they share stories of horror, sacrifice and extraordinary courage in intimate and painfully personal terms for the camera.
Moll eschews traditional narration here, intercutting between the various stories to dramatically reveal the full impact of their horrific experiences. Moll deliberately pushes a number of emotional buttons throughout the film, arousing audience sympathy for his subjects. He is aided by a highly emotive background score from Oscar winning composer Hans Zimmer.
As with the Oscar winning 1995 documentary Anne Frank Remembered, director Moll has taken some of the survivors back to the ruins of the camps to put their reminiscences into perspective. Some of them visibly break down on camera. It may be uncomfortable viewing for some, but it certainly makes for great drama. In one scene, a survivor actually confronts the Nazi doctor who performed experiments on her sister in the camps. But the most haunting and indelible images come from the previously unseen footage of the painfully thin and desiccated survivors of Dachau, taken by the US soldiers who liberated the notorious camp in 1945.
This intelligently constructed documentary tries to capture the grim extent of the unimaginable horror of these camps, but it is also a wonderfully uplifting testament to the resilience of the human spirit. The Last Days is one of the most powerful and memorable documentaries to hit our screens for some time.
**** greg king http://www.netau.com.au/gregking
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