2013 Cannes Film Festival Predictions: Claude Lanzmann’s The Last of the Unjust

#65. Claude Lanzmann’s The Last of the Unjust

Gist: This reveals a little-known yet fundamental aspect of the Holocaust, and sheds light on the origins of the “Final Solution” like never before. In the course of his work on “Shoah“, Claude Lanzmann has done a long and impressive conversation with Viennese Rabbi Benjamin Murmelstein (1905-89). In the centre was his ambivalent role as a senior official of the Jewish Community of Vienna controlled by Eichmann during the Nazi era and as “Jewish elder” in the concentration camp Theresienstadt. Embedded in our present time, this film’s goal is to make this extraordinary document available in an exciting way.

Prediction: Special Screenings. Lanzmann has made three separate trips to Cannes in 1970 (In Competition – Screenplay) for Élise ou la Vraie Vie, an Out of Comp slot for Sobibór, 14 octobre 1943, 16 heures and more recently as Cannes Classics showing for his Israel Why (207 minutess), but the film world will forever know him for Shoah (which the Criterion folks will release in June), so logically we see this continuation.