Children of the Night (1999)
*** (out of 4)
Effective, 18-minute documentary written and narrated by Mario Wiesel. The documentary shows silent, B&W footage of children who died in the Holocaust. Through the footage you get to see nameless faces who were being lined up to be executed. There's no question that this is a pretty powerful film but not because of any of the spoken words but instead it's the images that we see. In fact, I'd argue that Wiesel's narration hurt the film because quite often it did take you away from the images, although the "point" of the film is for her words to make you look at the images. To me the spoken words really weren't needed because nothing she said could show you the truth any more than the images themselves. As for the footage, it's certainly emotional stuff as we see children lined up, holding each other and if they weren't killed moments after the footage was shot then more than likely it wasn't too much after. We're told that the footage is extremely rare and it had to be searched out from all over the world. We're never told where exactly the footage came from or where it was shot but this doesn't take away from anything.
*** (out of 4)
Effective, 18-minute documentary written and narrated by Mario Wiesel. The documentary shows silent, B&W footage of children who died in the Holocaust. Through the footage you get to see nameless faces who were being lined up to be executed. There's no question that this is a pretty powerful film but not because of any of the spoken words but instead it's the images that we see. In fact, I'd argue that Wiesel's narration hurt the film because quite often it did take you away from the images, although the "point" of the film is for her words to make you look at the images. To me the spoken words really weren't needed because nothing she said could show you the truth any more than the images themselves. As for the footage, it's certainly emotional stuff as we see children lined up, holding each other and if they weren't killed moments after the footage was shot then more than likely it wasn't too much after. We're told that the footage is extremely rare and it had to be searched out from all over the world. We're never told where exactly the footage came from or where it was shot but this doesn't take away from anything.
