Film Screening: From Where They Stood

As French documentarian Christophe Cognet walks through the soggy grounds of a concentration camp, small white shards poke through the earth: They are bone fragments of the dead that rise to the surface when it rains. Similarly, this film reveals hidden remnants of those horrors. At risk of death, a handful of prisoners clandestinely photographed the workings of the camps and, in one case, buried the footage with the intention of recovering it after the war – which he miraculously did.

The filmmaker and camp historians study these messages from beyond, and, with meticulous rigor, reconstruct the time and place at which they were originally created and the events they record. Like Alain Resnais’ masterpiece NIGHT AND FOG, this film stands as a testimony to the millions of lives lost, as well as to the courage of those who risked everything to send us these artifacts from hell.

With support from the Joan S. Constantiner Fund for Jewish and Holocaust Film and the Richard Brick, Geri Ashur, and Sara Bershtel Fund for Social Justice Documentaries.