IFC Films announced today that they will be digitally releasing Claude Lanzmann's landmark Holocaust documentary SHOAH on March 2, 2021, marking the first time that the film will be available to own digitally and for rent in the United States and Canada.
Twelve years in the making, SHOAH is Lanzmann's monumental epic on the Holocaust and features interviews with survivors, bystanders, and perpetrators in 14 countries. The film does not contain any historical footage but rather features interviews which seek to "reincarnate" the Jewish tragedy and also visits places where the crimes took place. It grew out of Lanzmann's concern that the genocide perpetrated only 40 years earlier was already retreating into the mists of time, and that atrocity was becoming sanitized as History. His massive achievement - at once epic and intimate, immediate and definitive - is a triumph of form and content that reveals hidden truths while rewriting the rules of documentary filmmaking. Thirty-five years after its original release, SHOAH remains nothing less than essential.
SHOAH debuted to near universal acclaim in 1985, winning the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Non-Fiction Film, the BAFTA Award for Best Documentary, and the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Non-Fiction Film and lauded by critics as astonishing, indispensable filmmaking. In the New York Times, Vincent Canby called it "an extraordinary accomplishment...unlike any other Holocaust film ever made." Reviewing for
THE VILLAGE Voice, J. Hoberman wrote, "
Shoah transfixes you...I find myself still mulling over landscapes, facial expressions, vocal inflections - the very stuff of cinema." Roger Ebert wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times, "It is not a documentary, not journalism, not propaganda, not political. It is an act of witness."
The new digital release of SHOAH marks the third time that
IFC Films has worked to preserve and present this documentary masterpiece to audiences old and new. To mark the 25th anniversary in 2010,
IFC Films created two new 35mm prints for a theatrical release at the
IFC Center in New York City followed by a national rollout, and in 2013 partnered with the Criterion Collection to remaster the film and release a multi-disc restored 4K digital film transfer. As the film arrives on digital platforms for the first time,
IFC Films is planning a full marketing and publicity release campaign, including a new trailer.
Lanzmann, who died in 2018, said at the time of the 2010 theatrical re-release, "A film like SHOAH does not age. It gets no wrinkles, because it creates its own reality. At the beginning of SHOAH are the words: "The story begins in our day." That was true in 1985 and it is still true today. I hope that it will still be true in 50 years. I believe that
Shoah is an immortal film."
President of
IFC Films, Arianna Bocco adds, "As anti-Semitism and violence endure in our society, SHOAH's importance as a historical record of the atrocities of the Holocaust and as a tool for reflection is relevant now more than ever. Making this film available digitally across all platforms, to own for the first time, is an important step in providing accessibility, while also promoting historical context as an impactful educational resource. This work is ongoing and we should continually reflect on where we stand and what we stand for."
SHOAH will be available to purchase and rent in the United States and Canada on March 2, 2021, and available for streaming on
IFC Films Unlimited in June 2021. It will be available for purchase and rental on the Apple TV app, iTunes, Amazon, YouTube, Google Play, and Vudu in the U.S. and on the Apple TV app and iTunes in Canada.
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