Shoah

Shoah is a 1985 French documentary film about the Holocaust (known as "Shoah" in Hebrew since the 1940s), directed by Claude Lanzmann. Over nine hours long and eleven years in the making, the film presents Lanzmann's interviews with survivors, witnesses and perpetrators during visits to German Holocaust sites across Poland, including extermination camps. Released in Paris in April 1985, Shoah is frequently cited as one of the greatest documentaries ever made. It won critical acclaim and several prominent awards, including the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Non-Fiction Film and the BAFTA Award for Best Documentary. Simone de Beauvoir hailed it as a "sheer masterpiece", while documentarian Marcel Ophüls called it "the greatest documentary about contemporary history ever made". Conversely, it was not well received in Poland, wherein the government argued that it accused Poland of "complicity in Nazi genocide". Shoah premiered in New York at the Cinema Studio in October 1985 and was broadcast in the United States by PBS over four nights in 1987.