Thursday 31 January 2013
Claude Lanzmann | 2001 | 95 mins | French/Hebrew with English Subtitles
One of our main aims at Haringey Independent Cinema is to screen films which can inspire us – for example, by showing people working together to overthrow their oppressors – without lulling us into the false comforts of a ‘feelgood’ factor.
Claude Lanzmann’s 2001 documentary about the remarkable uprising at Sobibor, one of the Nazis’ most ‘efficient’ extermination camps, is an amazing – and little told – example of organised revolt against the odds. Focusing on the testimony of one man, Yehuda Lerner, speaking about his experiences some forty years after the facts, Lanzmann reconstitutes the jaw-dropping events of 14 October 1943, when six hundred Jewish inmates of Sobibor attempted to elude the gas chamber which awaited them, by killing their guards and making a break for it over the barbed wire and into the surrounding forest.