Shoah

Shoah is a 1985 documentary directed by Claude Lanzmann, running over nine hours, built entirely from interviews with Holocaust survivors, former Nazi perpetrators and Polish bystanders conducted over more than a decade of filming, with no archival footage or reenactment used anywhere in the film. Lanzmann instead returns repeatedly to the physical sites of the death camps as they stood at the time of filming, letting witnesses describe what happened there in their own words and, in several cases, through hidden-camera interviews with former perpetrators who did not know they were being filmed. Shoah is widely regarded as one of the most important and formally uncompromising documentaries ever made about the Holocaust, and its interview-only, no-archival-footage method has been highly influential on later historical documentary filmmaking.