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Lanzmann [Hot Docs 2015]
Sometimes the most complicated endeavors start from such simple intentions. In 1973, French director Claude Lanzmann was hired by the Israeli government to make a film about the Jewish people, their past, their culture, and their history. Lanzmann had already made a documentary about the country itself, Israel Why, so he had impressed his financial backers well enough to trust him with another project, a two hour film that was supposed to take 18 months to complete. Instead, the result was 10 hours long, edited for five years from over 300 hours of footage shot for nearly seven years in six languages. But the result was Shoah, the documentary masterpiece that is one of the most exhaustive records of the history of the Holocaust.