https://www.filmplatform.net/product/night-will-fall
Night Will Fall tells the story of the liberation of the German Concentration Camps. Using remarkable archive footage and testimony from both survivors and liberators, it tells of the efforts made to document the almost unbelievable scenes that the Allies encountered on liberation.
The film explores how a team of top filmmakers, including Sidney Bernstein, Richard Crossman and Alfred Hitchcock, came together to make a film to provide undeniable evidence of what the Allies found, but the film was stopped in its tracks by the British Government and only now 70 years on, has it been completed. Each new generation deserves access to this evidence.
In 1945, overseen by Alfred Hitchcock, a crack team of British film-makers went to Germany to document the horror of the concentration camps. Despite being hailed as a masterpiece, the film was never shown. Now, in a documentary called Night Will Fall, the full story of its creation and suppression is being told.
By Stuart Jeffries
For someone who was born more than four decades after the Holocaust, I have seen my share of horrifying, gut-wrenching, and heart-breaking footage from or about Nazi concentration camps. I’ve watched these documentaries and propaganda films in class, at the US Holocaust Museum, at Yad Vashem in Israel, at the Berlin Jewish Museum, and at several locations in Poland. I’ve worked on a film that describes the atrocities—in fact, I spent half of my life in Warsaw, where the memory of World War II lingers to this day. But I have never been as affected by any film as I was by the “German Concentration Camps Factual Survey,” a propaganda picture made in 1945, and shelved for 70 years.
