Earlier this year, the news broke that an unfinished documentary about the Holocaust—a film Alfred Hitchcock worked on in 1945—was in the process of being restored and readied for wider exposure. The film, Memory Of The Camps, had previously been shown on television in the 1980s in an abridged form, which was briefly available on-line back in January; but archivists are in the process of cleaning up and adding back in footage that had been missing from the project for decades. (The New Yorker’s Richard Brody has a good overview of the film as it existed before, and what might be in this long-lost “sixth reel.”) Today, Variety has more details about the scope of the whole Memory Of The Camps mission, which includes not just a full restoration of the documentary, but the production of a new documentary—called Night Will Fall—about the history of the original film. Among the executive producers of Night Will Fall is British director Stephen Frears, and now American director Brett Ratner is on-board as well, agreeing to serve as a producer through his company RatPac Films. Andre Singer, who produced The Act Of Killing, is directing Night Will Fall, which is being screened at the Berlin Film Festival as a work-in-progress and likely will have a brief festival run in the fall before its planned early 2015 release.
February 11, 2014 newsreel