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“The fate of the cinema classic "All Quiet on the Western Front"”
The 1930 Hollywood-produced anti-war film "Nothing New in the West" is one of the great works in film history. But like hardly any other cinema classic, it was ostracized, shortened, censored, altered in image and sound and banned. The documentary deals with the eventful fate and especially the censorship history of the film classic.
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DE
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When Allied forces liberated the Nazi concentration camps in 1944-45, their terrible discoveries were recorded by army and newsreel cameramen, revealing for the first time the full horror of what had happened. Making use of British, Soviet and American footage, the Ministry of Information’s Sidney Bernstein (later founder of Granada Television) aimed to create a documentary that would provide lasting, undeniable evidence of the Nazis’ unspeakable crimes. He commissioned a wealth of British talent, including editor Stewart McAllister, writer and future cabinet minister Richard Crossman – and, as treatment advisor, his friend Alfred Hitchcock. Yet, despite initial support from the British and US Governments, the film was shelved, and only now, 70 years on, has it been restored and completed by Imperial War Museums under its original title "German Concentration Camps Factual Survey".