Freeview film of the day: Night Will Fall

Night Will Fall ★★★★
9.00-10.20pm More4

Like most documentaries – and dramas – that dare to draw our gaze to the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps, Night Will Fall is a film that will repel and rivet at the same time. Unlike most chronicles of the subject, Andre Singer’s is essentially about another documentary, the Ministry of Information’s “Factual Survey” of the liberation of camps Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz and Majdanek, made in 1945 and mysteriously shelved by the government for political reasons (possibly to do with the situation in Palestine at the time). Singer intersperses the harrowing footage with new testimony from survivors, while the story of the documentary itself tells its own fascinating tale – Alfred Hitchcock was even brought in to advise. Moving, horrific, provocative and scary... and to quote from the original narration: “Unless the world learns the lessons these pictures teach, night will fall.”