Schindler's List

This shook the world with its brutally realistic portrayal of the Holocaust, one that took filmmaking techniques from documentaries, including a handheld camera during more chaotic scenes. The gorgeous monochrome cinematography further contributes to the sensation of watching real archive footage of the horrific events, while the long 3+ hour runtime runs smoothly with the masterful editing. It certainly helps in the film’s authenticity that director Steven Spielberg is of Jewish background, which naturally led to a sharper recreation of the setting. Other Holocaust survivors were also there on set, including one of the producers, who spent three years in several Nazi labor camps as a child.
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The structure of this narrative is quite genius when promoting the true value of life: rather than a traditional story with a beginning, middle, and end, the stories of individual Jews at the concentration camps are used to tell the story of Oskar Schindler, who started off as a con artist intending to make money off of the war, but over time lets his mysterious character come out more clearly. While the cast does put on some pretty awful fake accents, and there are many historical inaccuracies (for instance, the real Oskar Schindler never even created this list of his), Schindler’s List is still a powerful, important story about the failure to act on injustice. Hard to believe that Spielberg made this while also managing post-production remotely for Jurassic Park!

R (DLSNV)
Drama/Historic
3 hr. 15 min.

Watch it to THINK.
Watch it to LEARN.
​Watch it to feel HAPPY, SAD, and AFRAID.