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I got to know about this documentary seven years ago thanks to a professor and finally got to watch the first hour of it last year, and rewatch it from the beginning some days ago, taking me four days to finish it, because I almost didn't watch anything during one day.
And what can I say that wasn't said already? It's an amazing film on practically every aspect, capturing a huge variety of testimonies of such a horrible topic, noticing and asking for the contradictions of some answers (something very important that not all documentaries do), having a variety of voices from victims to witnesses and perpetrators, and even going to the extent of not using any archive footage and relying entirely on the people that lived through the Holocaust themselves.
Another good detail is how it doesn't focus just on it and includes opinions about the situation of the places it took place in, as well as the relationships between the Jews and everyone else, showing the anti-Semitism present on some of those even at the day of the filming (and of course, way later as well), and also how bad it was even for the non-Jewish people whose towns and villages were occupied and exploited, giving the documentary an even bigger sociological aspect than it already had.
If the content wasn't good enough by itself already, the presentation and directing are AS good as well, no music except for songs or themes sung or played by the people themselves, immersive sound mixing, no archive footage as previously mentioned, visualizing what the testimonies say whenever possible, and following the path of the train to not only cover all the places on which such a thing happened, but to also move to a different aspect and different people with different things to say, as well as giving the viewers the impression of both travelling to the camps themselves, thus making the whole thing more immersive, and also making it seem that the documentary itself is "moving", on the rails, thus using them as a sort of transition from one footage to another.
I can't help but admire this work also just because of all the job that had to be done as well, from investigating, travelling, contacting and hiring translators, making contact and establishing the interviews with the interviewed, doing the interviews themselves, capturing all that footage, and then doing all the editing that had to be done afterwards. The whole process took more than ten years to finish, and it even left out a lot more content that was released later on, and although I didn't watch all that yet, I bet based on descriptions that those other documentaries are also worth a watch, and not just some cashgrabs of barely any worthy extra material, as it happens in other mediums, I know about that pretty well myself, being an anime and old bands fan.
For minuses, there was a testimony of a man dedicated to deliver letters, sometime near the eight hour, of whom I don't think he added much of substance, and sometimes the director tended to zoom on the faces of the people when they seemed to be close to break in tears, which I find emotionally manipulative, and not something ethical to do nor positive for a product.
What more can I say? Despite its challenging nine and a half hours runtime, its obviously not meant to enjoy content, and some minuses, it's an amazing piece of work and in turn excellently presented, and on my mind easily one of the very few close to perfect media I've consumed in my life.
10/10
