Top 20 Alternative Picks for Cannes 2013: Claude Lanzmann’s The Last of the Unjust

The Last of the Unjust – Claude Lanzmann

Section: Out of Competition

Buzz: The guy who made Shoah made this. Period.

The Gist: 1975. In Rome, Claude Lanzmann filmed a series of interviews with Benjamin Murmelstein, the last President of the Jewish Council of Elders in the Theresienstadt ghetto in Czechoslovakia, the only “Jewish elder” (according to Nazi terminology) not to have been killed during the war. 2012. Claude Lanzmann, at 87, exhumes these interviews from Rome, returning to Theresienstadt, the town “given to the Jews by Hitler”, a so-called model ghetto, but a deceitful ghetto chosen by Eichmann to dupe the world. Through the various periods, from Nisko in Poland to Theresienstadt, and from Vienna to Rome, the film provides an unprecedented insight into the genesis of the Final Solution.