The Goethe-Institut Nigeria and the Alliance Française Lagos / Mike Adenuga Centre are set to participate in the worldwide screening of the documentary Shoah by Claude Lanzmann, organised by the Internationales Literaturfestival Berlin to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camp Auschwitz-Birkenau on January 27, 1945.
Scheduled to hold at the auditorium of Alliance Française Lagos / Mike Adenuga Centre in Ikoyi, Lagos, the nine and a half-hour film will be screened in four parts.
The first three parts of the screening will start with brief introductions to provide some historical contextualisation, while the 4th part will be introduced by Nigerian historian and filmmaker, Ed Keazor, who will talk about different aspects of the culture of remembrance.
In Shoah, both surviving victims and perpetrators of the systematic extermination of Jews by the German Reich get a chance to air their own side of the story.
According to Claude Lanzmann who worked on the film for 11 years (1974-1985) – ‘Shoah’ is not a film about survival but a “testimonial of death”. It not only asks the witnesses to recall their experiences, the questioning technique prompts interviewees to relive the past events.
In the film, Lanzmann’s questions revolve around events at the sites where Jews were murdered such as Chelmno, Treblinka, Auschwitz-Birkenau and the Warsaw Ghetto, laying open the bureaucratic mechanism of extermination.
The Berlinale awarded the director the Honorary Golden Bear for his life’s work in 2013, and he passed on on July 5, 2018.
Presently, his film is regarded as an epochal masterpiece of memory studies. For whatever bizarre reasons, his film was only shown in the “Forum” in its year of release (1985) in Germany; the younger generations barely know him anymore. In view of these circumstances and the new wave of anti-Semitism, which is virulent worldwide – especially in the USA, United Kingdom, France, and Germany – the international presentation is clear.
January 27, International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust, was introduced by the United Nations in 2005 to commemorate the Holocaust and the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp on January 27, 1945. The Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp was the largest German extermination camp during National Socialism. About 1.1 million people were murdered there. A total of over 5.6 million people fell victim to the Holocaust.
Directed by Claude Lanzmann, among the crew are Dominique Chapuis, Jimmy Glasberg, and William Lubtchansky on camera; Ziva Postec and Anna Ruiz as editors and Bernard Aubouy and Michel Vionnet on sound.
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