Director of Holocaust film 'Shoah', dies at 92

pulse

July 5, 2018 11:36 AM

His death was also confirmed by a press officer for his final film, "The Four Sisters", which was released in France just this week.

French film-maker and writer Claude Lanzmann, director of the landmark Holocaust documentary "Shoah" which runs more than nine hours long, died in Paris on Thursday at the age of 92, his publisher said.

"Claude Lanzmann died at his home. He had been very, very weak for several days," a spokeswoman for publishing house Gallimard told AFP.

Lanzmann had never stopped working, regularly presenting films which often took their inspiration from chapters of his own life.

Last year for example he presented at the Cannes film festival "Napalm", about his brief but intense romance with a North Korean nurse in 1958.

But it was the 1985 release of "Shoah" (the French word for Holocaust), considered by many the most haunting film made about the murder of six million Jews during World War II, which propelled him to global acclaim.

The nine-and-a-half hour work consists largely of interviews with survivors and witnesses of Nazi death camps in Poland, alongside chilling images of where the horrors occurred.

"If I am unstoppable it's because of the truth, which I believe in profoundly," he said in an interview with AFP last year.

"When I look at what I did in my life, I believe that I came to represent the truth, I never played with it."

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