Cohen Media Group is proud to announce the release of Claude Lanzmann's final documentary SHOAH: FOUR SISTERS, a selection of the Cannes and New York Film Festivals, scheduled to open in New York on Wednesday, November 14 at The Quad Cinema followed by a national roll out. Composed of four segments, The Hippocratic Oath, The Merry Flea, Noah’s Ark, and Baluty, SHOAH: FOUR SISTERS will be released theatrically in two parts.
Starting in 1999, Claude Lanzmann made several films that could be considered satellites of SHOAH, comprised of interviews conducted in the 1970s that did not make it into the final, monumental work. In the last years of the director’s life, he decided to devote a film to four women from four different areas of Eastern Europe with four different destinies, each finding herself improbably alive after war’s end: Ruth Elias from Ostravia, Czechoslovakia (The Hippocratic Oath); Paula Biren from Lodz, Poland (Baluty); Ada Lichtman from further south in Krakow (The Merry Flea) and Hannah Marton from Cluj, or Kolozsvár, in Transylvania (Noah’s Ark). Survivors of unimaginable Nazi horrors during the Holocaust, they tell their individual stories and become crucial witnesses to the barbarism they experienced. “What they have in common,” wrote Lanzmann, "apart from the specific horrors each one of them was subjected to, is their intelligence, an incisive, sharp and carnal intelligence that rejects all pretense and false reasons-in a word-idealism.”
The filmmaker, journalist, and author died in Paris on July 5, 2018, one day after SHOAH: FOUR SISTERS was released in French cinemas. He was accorded a funeral at the Panthéon, the secular mausoleum where some of France’s most distinguished citizens are buried, including Voltaire, Rousseau, Marie Curie and Simone Veil. Besides SHOAH, Lanzmann’s films include: A Visitor from the Living; Sobibor, Oct 14, 1943, 4 pm; The Karski Report, and The Last of The Unjust. His memoir, The Patagonian Hare, was published in the US in 2012.
A retrospective of Claude Lanzmann’s films entitled “Claude Lanzmann’s Cinema of Remembrance" will be held at The Quad from November 9-21.
"Lanzmann’s own work—in its insight, its devotion, and its imaginative sympathy—is itself heroic.”—Richard Brody, The New Yorker
“Like the greatest of filmmakers, Lanzmann knows how to use basic cinematic tools — a camera, a sound recorder and an edit table — to cut to the heart of the matter. The Hippocratic Oath, made over thirty years after Shoah, continues in that film's tradition as both a testament to survival and proof that the cinema can capture the darkest of human truths.” - Jordan Mintzer, The Hollywood Reporter
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