Victims’ Rare, Clandestine Photographs,
Rigorously Analyzed, Retrace Holocaust Events
Greenwich Entertainment announced today the U.S. and Canadian release of the documentary From Where They Stood (À pas aveugles) written and directed by Christophe Cognet. The North American theatrical release begins July 15, 2022 at NYC’s Film Forum followed by additional major US & Canadian cities.
A 2021 Berlinale Forum premiere, From Where They Stood went on to win the Spirit of Freedom Award for Best Documentary at the 2021 Jerusalem Film Festival. The US festival premiere was at the 2022 New York Jewish Film Festival at Lincoln Center.
It’s not widely known but somehow a handful of prisoners in Nazi concentration camps managed to take clandestine photographs of the hell the Nazis were hiding from the world.
Either smuggled out or hidden and retrieved only after the war, Director Christophe Cognet retraces the footsteps of these courageous men and women in a quest to unearth the circumstances and the stories behind their photographs.
MORE ABOUT ‘FROM WHERE THEY STOOD’
As the French documentarian walks through the soggy grounds of a concentration camp, small white shards poke through the earth. They are bone fragments of the dead that rise to the surface when it rains. Similarly, this film reveals hidden remnants of those horrors. At risk of death, a handful of prisoners clandestinely photographed the workings of the camps and, in one case, buried the footage with the intention of recovering it after the war – which he miraculously did. The filmmaker and camp historians study these messages from beyond, and, with meticulous rigor, reconstruct the time and place at which they were originally created and the events they record. Like Alain Resnais’s masterpiece, NIGHT AND FOG, this film stands as a testimony to the millions of lives lost, as well as to the courage of those who risked everything to send these artifacts from hell. (Source: Film Forum)
Runtime: 109 minutes
