Night Will Fall (2014)

As the curtain of World War II began to descend in April 1945, newly trained combat cameramen found themselves thrust into a chilling narrative unfolding in Germany. Their lenses captured the harrowing scenes hidden behind the recently liberated walls of Nazi concentration camps, the horrifying testament to humanity's darkest hour. The culmination of these raw, powerful images gave birth to the British government's documentary, "German Concentration Camps Factual Survey," a project spearheaded by Sidney Bernstein and bolstered by the involvement of Alfred Hitchcock. Yet, for almost seventy years, this monumental footage remained unseen, locked away in the British archives, its public screening thwarted by political machinations or simply lost in the shifting sands of government priorities. That remained the case until a dedicated team of historians and film scholars from the British Imperial War Museum breathed new life into the film, meticulously restoring the original footage. "Night Will Fall" (2014), a documentary constructed from this restored footage, offers a stark chronicle of the unspeakable atrocities committed within the concentration and labor camps of Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz, Majdanek, Dachau, and Buchenwald. Seamlessly interwoven with survivor and liberator interviews, short newsreel films, and original footage, the film also includes previously unseen shots captured by Soviet cameramen. The documentary does not recoil from the horrific. Its unflinching gaze lingers on the German SS officers and the haunting faces of skeletal bodies piled in mass graves. Yet, amid the nightmare, the film also illuminates the path to healing embarked upon by the survivors, stripped of their humanity by their captors. In essence, "Night Will Fall" serves as an enduring testament to the horrors of the Nazi regime, but it is also a compelling reminder of the resilience of the human spirit, delivering a profound lesson about the capacity for both inhumanity and redemption that lies within us all.

Night Will Fall is a documentary movie featuring Helena Bonham Carter and directed by André Singer.

It is possible to buy Night Will Fall on Apple iTunes.