The Last Days review

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This Oscar-winning documentary (executive produced by Steven Spielberg) is the first cinematic release from the Shoah Visual History Foundation.

The carefully assembled film incorporates hitherto undiscovered archival footage and still photographs, concentrating on one aspect of the Final Solution - the treatment of the Hungarian Jews in the last year of World War Two. The Last Days focuses on the testimonies of five Hungarian survivors now living in America, including interviews with a Nazi medical experimenter and an inmate of one of the death camps who was forced to cremate bodies from the gas chamber.

Despite the overly obtrusive score, this remains an unquestionably moving work, as individuals remember their horrendous experiences. Man's inhumanity to fellow man may be familiar territory - yet one is still struck by the resilience of the human spirit.

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