Night Will Fall
Night Will Fall is a 2014 documentary film directed by Andre Singer that chronicles the making of the 1945 British government documentary German Concentration Camps Factual Survey. The 1945 documentary, which showed gruesome scenes from newly liberated Nazi concentration camps, languished in British archives for nearly seven decades and was only recently completed.
Night Will Fall
Lynette Singer
Sally Angel
Brett Ratner
Richard Blanshard
Nicholas Singer
- 7 June 2014 (Sheffield DocFest)
75 minutes
United Kingdom
The 1945 documentary, based on the work of combat cameramen serving with the armed forces and newsreel footage, was produced by Sidney Bernstein, then a British government official, with participation by Alfred Hitchcock. About 12 minutes of footage in this 75-minute film is from the earlier documentary.[2][3]
The title of the film was derived from a line of narration in the 1945 documentary: "Unless the world learns the lesson these pictures teach, night will fall."[4]
Critical reaction[edit]
The film received critical acclaim. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a rating of 100% based on 23 reviews, with an average rating of 8.13/10.[10] Variety called it a "powerful, must-see documentary."[3] In The Guardian, critic Peter Bradshaw said the film shows "images which I have certainly never seen before. It exposes once again the obscenity of Holocaust denial. This is an extraordinary record. But be warned. Once seen, these images cannot be unseen."[9] The New York Times called it "not a film you’re likely to forget," and that "what the new film accomplishes, more than anything else, is to make you wish you could see the original."[4]
The film's score, composed by Nicholas Singer, was nominated for Best Composition in a Feature Film at the 2015 UK Music and Sound Awards. The film won the Royal Television Society award for History in 2016, where it was cited as "A landmark film, an affirmation of the importance of television as a medium of truth and a document of record in itself."[11] It also won a Peabody Award in New York in April 2016.[12][13]
Screenings[edit]
Night Will Fall was broadcast in the UK on Channel 4 on 24 January 2015 as a single continuous programme, without any commercial breaks. It aired on major networks around the world during the week of 27 January, Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.[2][14] It was broadcast by Swedish television SVT on 26 January 2015, also by NRK three times in January 2015, and by HBO in the United States.