Night Will Fall

When images of the Nazi concentration camps flooded collective consciousness in 1945, few expected that other images were being prevented from public display. Night Will Fall tells the fascinating story of that documentation, largely unseen until now. drawn from a 1945 documentary by Alfred Hitchcock and Sidney Bernstein that was shelved for political reasons and resuscitated nearly 70 years later by the Imperial War Museum, Night Will Fall deftly weaves two stories into one documentary tale – one about the atrocities of the Nazi concentration camps, the other about the changing policies of postwar reconstruction that pulled atrocity images into and out of public view. Tracing events associated with both the liberation of the concentration camps and the censorship that followed, Night Will Fall is a documentary gem: it seamlessly brings together original footage by American, British and Russian photographers and camera crews with on-site interviews among survivors and soldiers and conversations with archivists and filmmakers. Night Will Fall artfully reinstates an obscure moment in holocaust history that attests to the enduring power of visual documentation. For reminding us of how cogently visuals bear witness to humanity’s underside, Night Will Fall earns a Peabody Award.