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| Directed by James Moll; Appearances by Bill Basch, Alice Lok Cahana, Renee Firestone, Dario Gabbai, Tom Lantos, and Irene Zisblatt |
Of all the categories at the Academy Awards, the Best Documentary Feature award is the one I always feel bad about missing. Every year I always seem to have seen one of the nominees on TV just before the ceremony (4 Little Girls, Farm: Angola, USA), but I do not finish off all the nominees until years later (I just saw 1997 nominee Troublesome Creek: A Midwestern last week). The reason for this is that documentaries tend to have awful releasing as they do not hit many theatres and video is even more limited (with the exception of things like The War Room and Roger & Me). It should be as no surprise then that the viewing of The Last Days was my first time to get to see a Oscar nominated Documentary in the theatre, and what a place to begin.
The Last Days is the product of Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of Shoah Visual History Foundation and it seems a little too proud of its producer at the beginning (opening with a title card that simply says “Steven Spielberg” is a little much). The film follows the stories of five Holocaust survivors brought to concentration camps after the Nazi occupation of Hungary during the final years of the Second World War. The five range from homemaker to artist to US Congressman. They remember parts of the war while making their way back home after living in America since the war.
This would be the best documentary I’ve seen since Steven Soderbergh’s Gray’s Anatomy two years ago. While it did not make me cry, I found it to be gut wrenching and utterly emotional. It only falters in the second half-hour in which the film spends too much time on parts of the experience already trekked through in many previous documentaries. Still it is much better than the undeserving The Long Way Home (winner of the Oscar last year).
