Released 1985
Directed by Claude Lanzmann

For more than nine hours I sat and watched this film. When it was over, I sat for a while longer and simply stared into space, trying to understand my emotions. I had seen a memory of the most debased chapter in human history. But I had also seen a film that affirmed life so passionately that I did not know where to turn with my confused feelings. There is no proper response to this film. It is an enormous fact, a 550-minute howl of pain and anger in the face of genocide. It is one of the noblest films ever made. The title is a Hebrew word for chaos or annihilation - for the Holocaust. The film is a documentary, but it does not contain images from the 1940s. There are no old newsreel shots. All of the movie was photographed in the last five or six years (late 1970's to early 1980's) by a man who went looking for eyewitnesses to Hitler's "Final Solution." They talk and talk. "Shoah" is a torrent of words, and yet the overwhelming impression, when it is over, is one of silence.

Summary by Roger Ebert