Best movie of this year hands down!

A Masterpiece!

It's hard to see any effort in the film. There's no comedy to speak of, no real drama and, worst of all.

Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

"Shoah" is a French documentary film from over 30 years ago that runs for over 9.5 hours. It consists of 2 parts that are both longer than 4.5 hours. The writer and director is French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, which is why a lot of the film is in French. But there are parts in English, German, Hebrew, Polish... as well, so to full understand this movie, you will 99% need subtitles. The main problem for me was the runtime. It would have been okay if this was a series maybe consisting of 10 episodes, but in terms of a film, it should be possible to watch it during one viewing and this is hardly the case here.My criticism has little to do with the contents. The reports of the witnesses from both sides are informative and intriguing, even if there is nothing really in here that I have not seen or heard in other documentaries yet. Then again, these documentaries were made considerably later for the most part, so "Shoah" is a bit of an achievement also in terms of its time. It is mostly memorable because there is no archive footage used from concentration camps etc. used. It is basically all interviews. I am not sure if I like this though. If they show trains today riding there, then why not show trains with prisoners from back then. As a whole, I personally do not have a lot of interest in watching these over 10 hours again. Way too long for its own good and the runtime definitely hurts the viewer's perception and focus. Thumbs down.

Powerful film. I have seen many films and read many books, so very little of the information came as a surprise...EXCEPT, and looking around the comments, another poster "Lufty" described what impacted me most about Shoa. Here are his words, I could not have expressed them better than he does:"The complicity of most of the populations of Central and Eastern Europe in this horrid stain on human history was most famously exposed in Goldhagen's "Hitler's Willing Executioners" (released 12 years after "Shoah")which investigates the endemic antisemitism throughout this part of Europe and how Hitler's rantings were descended upon a more than willing audience.And THAT is Lanzmann's brilliance. Through their own words, he demonstrates clearly that not only were those in the areas of these camps fully aware of what was happening, but fully complicit in it. And more frightening is that even knowing what happened, and the unimaginable results, their attitudes, in many cases have not changed."That is what I found most disturbing, specially considering this film was made 30 years after the events, when EVERYONE knew exactly what had happened.

Shoah is maybe unique as a documentary on the subject as it contains on one hand the only testimonies of lone survivors of death camps or important work units in those camps, and on the other hand it also has testimonies of actors in the execution of the final solution. It's construction makes you understand all the evolution of the process over the years from the thirties to the very end of the war. The intensity of the emotions that you sense during the interviews as are the surgical precision of certain descriptions of the horrors were for me more emotional than that felt by seeing any of the motion pictures or other documentaries on the subject.Shoah is as intense as it is long, more than 9 hours of interviews without any reenactments. But you don't need those, the testimonies leave you with vivid images that will haunt you for the rest of your life.The witnesses of this documentary are now dead, Lanzmann has made sure that their testimonies be heard for the generations to come.

Documentary on the holocaust that used no archival footage. This is the story of what happened to the people in and around the camps as told by them. Its is a story who's truth and pain is written in each weathered face and teary eye.I have a weird relationship with this film. I originally bought the companion book for this film (collecting all of the dialog) and read that long before I could see the film at the local cinema. I then had to wait for the arrival on home video to see the film since the film played in a movie house that was a converted school house with wooden seats. the prospect of sitting on hard chairs for over ten hours (9 and a half hours of film plus breaks) was daunting. Instead I waited until it ran on local TV and I taped it and I watched it at my leisure. My attitude at the time was that it was one of the greatest films ever and the high point of documentary film making. 20 years later, seeing the film again on DVD I was actually disappointed. Don't get me wrong this is a vital and powerful film that records an important event in history. And from that point of view its a great film. The problem is that watching it with 20 years of time I didn't quite get as lost in the film as I had the first time out.The problem for me comes from the fact that this is a nine and a half hour immersion tank of a film. After a lyric opening sequence we are thrust into the remembrances with very little to go on. Survivor follows survivor in such away that all sense of time is lost, when are we? who are we listening to? After a while it all blends together. While its never boring (trust me you will sit glued to the screen for its entire running time) there is no real sense of progress, its just the events in the death camps with no little sense of when these things were happening. I understand that that is the way memory works but at the same time I wish there had been some kind of structure to it all.(I honestly thought I mixed up the DVDs at one point) Is the film worth seeing. Oh dear god yes. It is heartbreaking and touching and will probably teach you something. Best of all it is never boring, you will not check your watch during its running time. Its a masterwork, an almost perfect one.