This extraordinary, wholly unfamiliar,
unprecedented film uses previously unknown photographs that demands to be seen.
From Where They Stood gives back the gaze to those who dared to record what they witnessed. The weighty act of looking is returned to the subjects.”
FROM WHERE THEY STOOD
Victims’ Rare, Clandestine Photographs,
Rigorously Analyzed, Retrace Holocaust Events
Jerusalem Film Festival Best Documentary Winner Explores Clandestine Nazi Death Camp Photos
STREAMING ON DEMAND (TVOD), SEPTEMBER 13
It is a testament to the courage of prisoners who wanted to document the truth so that we could learn and never repeat history
Archival footage about the horrible conditions in concentration camps but also a very different use of the documentary medium to tell such a story.”
Greenwich Entertainment announced the U.S. and Canadian release of the docum From Where They Stood (À pas aveugles) written and directed by Christophe Cognet.
The North American theatrical started last Friday, July 15, 2022 at NYC’s Film Forum. The film is holding there for another week. Additional major US & Canadian cites coming soon including Los Angeles at Laemmle Theater locations the Royal and Town Center 5.
It’s not known that handful of prisoners in Nazi concentration camps managed to take clandestine photographs of the Nazi hell.
Either smuggled out or hidden and retrieved only after the war, Director Christophe Cognet retraces the footsteps of these courageous men and women in quest to unearth the circumstances and the stories behind their photographs.
FROM WHERE THEY STOOD was produced by Raphaël Pillosio.
Greenwich’s Edward Arentz negotiated the acquisition with Fionnuala Jamison of MK2 International on behalf of the filmmakers.
“In contrast to today when thankfully evidence of war crimes and genocide can be gathered often remotely and disseminated worldwide with startling precision and detail, the individuals who took these photos risked everything to pierce the cloak of secrecy that surrounded the genocidal horror of the Nazi murder machine and remain a testimony to their courage and defiance in the face of totalitarian evil,” says Greenwich’s co-president Edward Arentz.
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
PRAISE FOR THIS IMPORTANT FILM
“Photography in this context, becomes courageous act of resistance.
The filmmaker explores the details—some known, others only guessed at—revealed by their raw transmission of unfathomable experience…Celebrate(s) the courageous audacity of prisoner-photographers. Their resistance fights on, in its vivid and direct communication between their time and ours.”
“In analyzing with meticulous precision the microcosm of each picture, Christophe Cognet pays homage from a correct and respectful distance to these men and women who risked their lives to take back control of their own image and to send this chilling and vital message of history: ‘this happened.’”
– Fabien Lemercier, Cineuropa
Critical Status:
A 2021 Berlinale Forum premiere, From Where They Stood won the Spirit of Freedom Award for Best Documentary at the 2021 Jerusalem Film Fest.
The US festival premiere was at the 2022 New York Jewish Film Festival at Lincoln Center.
