FILM

This page serves as a helpful media studies resource for teachers committed to educating students about the Holocaust through the lens of cinema. It provides a structured, scholarly approach to film integration by featuring the film categorisations (e.g., Holocaust-Centred, Tangential) and includes recommendations from Holocaust film expert Professor Rich Brownstein of Yad Vashem.
​Educators can purchase Brownstein's extensive film analysis, which includes an educational guide and a selection of recommended documentaries, to contextualize difficult historical content, facilitate critical media literacy, and select age-appropriate, historically accurate viewing material for Social Studies, History, and Media Studies curricula.

Professor Rich Brownstein of Yad Vashem, categorises Holocaust films along two key dimensions (and within each, provides further sub-categorisation based on ethnicity/role and time period):
 

A.  HOLOCAUST-CENTRED FILMS

B.  TANGENTIAL HOLOCAUST FILMS
(not expressly focused on the genocide of European Jews by the  Nazis, but touch on the plight of Jews during World War II)

Professor Brownstein’s list of the Most Culturally Significant Holocaust Films (as of 2018) - by category

Holocaust Cinema Complete:
A History and Analysis of 400 Films, with a Teaching Guide
By Rich Brownstein, October 2021
Forewords by Tim Blake Nelson; Michael Berenbaum & Edward Jacobs; Walter Reich; and David Zucker,  

Holocaust cinema is so venerated that one-third of all American Holocaust films have been nominated for at least one Oscar. Nonetheless, most Holocaust films have fallen through the cracks, while others have spawned controversy or even outrage. This book explains these trends—and many others—in a complete guide to 400+ Holocaust films and made-for-television movies.

From Anne Frank to Schindler’s List to Jojo Rabbit, Holocaust films are put into historical and artistic perspective and are discussed through many lenses: historically, chronologically, thematically, sociologically, geographically and individually. The filmmakers behind these films are also contextualised, including Charlie Chaplin, Sidney Lumet, Woody Allen, Quentin Tarantino, Steven Spielberg and Roman Polanski. This book also includes recommendations and reviews of the 50 best Holocaust films, an educational guide, and a detailed listing of each Holocaust film.

To purchase in New Zealand head to PaperPlus

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Notable Documentaries

• Three Minutes: A Lengthening

​AMSTERDAM: Glenn Kurtz found the film reel in a corner of his parents’ closet in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, in 2009. It was in a dented aluminum canister. Florida’s heat and humidity had nearly solidified the celluloid into a mass “like a hockey puck,” Kurtz said. But someone had transferred part of it onto VHS tape in the 1980s, so Kurtz could see what it contained: a home movie titled “Our Trip to Holland, Belgium, Poland, Switzerland, France and England, 1938.”
The 16-mm film, made by his grandfather, David Kurtz, on the eve of World War II, showed the Alps, quaint Dutch villages and three minutes of footage of a vibrant Jewish community in a Polish town. Old men in yarmulkes, skinny boys in caps, girls with long braids. Smiling and joking. People pour through the large doors of a synagogue. There’s some shoving in a cafe, and then that’s it. The footage ends abruptly. Glenn Kurtz, nevertheless, understood the value of the material as evidence of Jewish life in Poland just before the Holocaust. It would take him nearly a year to figure it out, but he discovered that the footage depicted Nasielsk, his grandfather’s birthplace, a town about 30 miles northwest of Warsaw that some 3,000 Jews called home before the war. Fewer than 100 would survive it.

Dutch filmmaker Bianca Stigter has used the fragmentary, ephemeral footage to create “Three Minutes: A Lengthening,” a 70-minute feature film that helps to further define what and who were lost.

Read article: Film captures Jewish life in a Polish town before the Nazis arrive, by Nina Siegal
Watch  trailer here 
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• Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution, BBC

Written by Laurence Rees, it contains new research and perspectives on the Holocaust. Combines rare footage with illustrations and dramatic reconstructions.

• Nazis – A Warning from History

Ian Kershaw, BBC documentary on the rise and fall of the Third Reich. Kershaw focuses on ordinary Germans and Europeans as collaborators and bystanders, 1997.

• Nicholas Winton – The Power of Good

The award-winning story of the courage and determination of one man who saved 669 children from the Nazis.