Night and Fog

Nuit et brouillard (1955)
Director: Alain Resnais
Runtime: 30 min

Short and analytical documentary about Nazi concentration camps, primarily Auschwitz. It covers many aspects: the construction and setting up of the camps, hierarchy and the role of Kapos (inmates who become supervisors of other inmates), the exploitation of slave labor and prostitution, starvation, torture and brutalization, various scientific and medical “experiments”, an industrial system of mass murder, etc. At the end it warns us that war is sleeping with one eye open and crime against humanity is not a matter of the past, and that these atrocities were quickly forgotten, because no one wanted to remember them. The attempts of the French censors to cut out the last 10 minutes of the film in 1955, even though the same scenes were used as evidence at the Nuremberg trials ten years earlier, only confirm how true this is.

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