Luke Holland: Last News

The USC Shoah Foundation has partnered with Participant and Focus Features to unveil a new initiative for university and upper-level high school educators, aimed at combatting antisemitism, and promoting education surrounding the Holocaust.

There have been countless documentaries and TV specials about World War II and the rise of the Nazis during that era. We’ve seen archival footage, interviews with soldiers, discussions with Holocaust survivors, and just hours upon hours of historians giving the facts that led to one of the worst times in human history.

Focus Features is teaming with Participant to release the late director Luke Holland's documentary Final Account. Wednesday's announcement coincided with International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media ReporterFocus Features has nabbed worldwide rights to Luke Holland’s “Final Account,” a documentary about the last living generation from Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. The announcement was tied to International Holocaust Remembrance Day.Focus plans to release the film — in collaboration with Participant Media — in the U.S.

Jay Weissberg We all know that knee-jerk racism and willful ignorance are the handmaidens of evil: Without these all-too-common traits, heinous acts are difficult to perpetrate on a large scale. Documentary maker Luke Holland’s “Final Account” is the first product of an ambitious undertaking to interview the now elderly helpers and handmaidens whose tacit acceptance of the Nazi regime enabled the Final Solution.

The 2020 Venice Film Festival is surprisingly political this year, with a slew of documentaries —environmental docI Am Greta,Luke Holland's Holocaust documentaryFinal Account — and features — Jasmila Zbanic'sQuo Vadis, Aida?about the Srebrenica massacre, and Regina King's civil rights drama One Night in Miami — taking center stage at an event often more famous for its red carpet glamor than its soap-box messaging. The ongoing civil war in Syria, the plight of war refugees, and the intersection of First World commerce with Third World suffering are in focus in The Man Who Sold His Skin, a new feature from Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania, which premieres in Venice's Orizzonti section on Saturday.

There are no heroes in Final Account, no one to empathize with. What makes it uniquely worth watching is its cast of octogenarians and nonagenarians who were eyewitnesses and in some cases active participants in the horrors of the concentration camps.

Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentU.S.