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The history of the Chamonix Guides Company is inseparable from that of mountaineering and the valley where it was born. For 200 years, guides have risen to multiple challenges, making their organization a legend. Today, they are the actors of a changing mountain: overcrowding, global warming, loss of freedom—the causes are multiple. This film is at a crossroads. Between tradition and modernity, it traces the history of the Chamonix Guides Company, evoking the incredible challenges it has met with dignity and those it now faces.
Status
Released
Original Language
FR

Dick Proenneke retired at age 50 in 1967 and decided to build his own cabin in the wilderness at the base of the Aleutian Peninsula, in what is now Lake Clark National Park. Using color footage he shot himself, Proenneke traces how he came to this remote area, selected a homestead site and built his log cabin completely by himself. The documentary covers his first year in-country, showing his day-to-day activities and the passing of the seasons as he sought to scratch out a living alone in the wilderness.

Director Claude Lanzmann spent 11 years on this sprawling documentary about the Holocaust, conducting his own interviews and refusing to use a single frame of archival footage. Dividing Holocaust witnesses into three categories – survivors, bystanders, and perpetrators – Lanzmann presents testimonies from survivors of the Chelmno concentration camp, an Auschwitz escapee, and witnesses of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, as well as a chilling report of gas chambers from an SS officer at Treblinka.