Twenty-five years ago, filmmaker Claude Lanzmann stunned critics and viewers with Shoah, a 9 1/2-hour film that described Nazi death camps with neither archival footage nor narration. Instead, the film allowed those who managed to live through the horrors to describe what they endured. Shoah hasn’t played in U.S. theaters, though, since it premiered a quarter-century ago. Now it’s back — and not as a history lesson. “It is not to give information that you could find in any kind of history book,” Lanzmann says.

“No one history book can give you the emotions, the strengths of [the] human face, when the people are paying the highest price in order to revive what they went through.”

It is just as the French film maker Claude Lanzmann put it in an interview: I am fully convinced that «Shoah» changes every single spectator. «Shoah» somehow marks everyone that watches the movie. So what is left is the fact that we have to bear with the questions the film brings about. Our task is to let the impressions sink in and find a way to express it in a form that is fit for the future.