WATCH DOCS
Festival 2023
Archival content
open current edition
The Last of the Unjust

The Last of the Unjust

219' 2013
dir.: Claude Lanzmann

This continuation and complementation of the monumental Shoah is also one of the most important Holocaust documentaries with Lanzmann once again plunging into the heart of darkness to understand the essence of humanity. 

Filmed in Rome in 1975, this conversation between Claude Lanzmann and Benjamin Murmelstein, the last Elder of the Judenrat at the Theresienstadt ghetto and the only head of the Jewish Council of Elders who survived the war, did not make it into Lanzmann's groundbreaking, nearly 10-hour-long “Shoah.” Years later, however, the director decided to make use of this fascinating footage. Lanzmann visited the places that they talked about at the time and made yet another film that is fundamental to our understanding of the Holocaust. Murmelstein turned out to be a remarkable interlocutor: incredibly intelligent, sardonic, and in a position to offer that which the court in Jerusalem did not want to take from him in the case against Eichmann: the invaluable testimony of a man whose fate was to survive for years near the very heart of darkness.  

Maciej Nowicki 

Festivals

2013 CPH:DOX
2013 Cannes
2013 Viennale
2013 TIFF
2013 New York FF
2013 BFI London FF
2013 IDFA
2014 WATCH DOCS IFF

Tickets and passes
219' 2013 France, Austria
Director
Claude Lanzmann
Cinematography
Caroline Champetier, William Lubtchansky
Editing
Chantal Hymans
Production
Synecdoche, Le Pacte, Dor Film Produktionsgesellschaft, Canal+, Centre national du cinéma et de l'image animée (CNC), Ciné+, Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah, France 3 Cinéma, France Télévisions, La Région Île-de-France, Les Films Aleph, ORF Film/Fernseh-Abkommen
Screenings