Only a few people know that the master of horror, Mr. Alfred Hitchcock, made a film about the fascist atrocities in concentration camps, captured by the camera of British and Soviet soldiers upon entering the German death camps in 1945. When Hitchcock began viewing the footage in Pinewood Studio, from the horror that he had seen there, it took him weeks to return and to finish the editing. After the documentary named ” Memory of Camps ” was finally ready – the film screening encountered a new problem: at the end of 1945 the Americans believed that Russians have become bigger enemies then the Germans, so they did not want to spread an anti – German mood, while the English had begun to have problems with the creation of the new state of Israel, and did not want to show the Jews solely as victims of fascist terror. So the movie ended up deposited in the London Imperial War Museum until it was finally presented in 1984 at the festival in Berlin, but because the recordings were of very poor quality and the film was incomplete – it did not attract any attention.

Director Andre Singer got the idea of making a film about a film after the Imperial War Museum found a sixth roll of Hitchcock’s film. Thanks to new techniques and digital image processing of the existing film, six former inmates were recognized, who were witnesses to the atrocities in these camps. Last week the British film crew came to Zagreb to meet with Mr. Branko Lustig, a double Oscar winner and a former inmate of these camps, to show him the restored movie and to ask him for some clarification and advice. Branko watched the scenes of horror of Nazi camps calmly and silently and only a couple of times stopped the movie to look back on the scene, which he himself had witnessed too many times. Director Andre Singer was surprised by the amount of memories that Mr. Lustig still holds, to which Mr. Lustig said: “You would remember this too if you had survived what I had been through! This is impossible to forget, even though I was only 12 years old back then!”

Finally, after 69 years a remake of this documentary will be shown in its entirety under the name “Night Will Fall”. The new version is done as it was imagined by Alfred Hitchcock himself with important addition of testimonies of former inmates and soldiers. Although the film was supposed to be launched on British television in 2015, with an intention to mark the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Hitler’s fascism, these days it was decided to present it already in February of 2014, at the Festival in Berlin. In gratitude to Mr. Lustig’s generous assistance and advice in the realization of the film, in May of 2014, we will show “Night Will Fall” as part of the Festival of tolerance program, and thus our audience will be the first after Berlin’s premiere to watch this yet unseen work. Mr. Lustig who is excited to host this documentary at the Festival of Tolerance this year said: “Who would have hoped that at the end of my life, professional paths of me and Alfred Hitchcock will intertwine.”