Although the original intention of my Indelible Shadows was to assemble and analyze fiction films about the Holocaust, nonfiction has proven to be not only more appropriate but often more dramatic as an approach to this subject matter. By the second edition in 1989, there was a vigorous body of work which I had termed “personal documentary,” characterized by subjectivity: a film would chronicle the return of a survivor to a place that no longer knows him or her, usually a hometown tantamount to loss, or a concentration camp still redolent of terror.

This phenomenon has grown into what could be considered a subgenre of the Holocaust film, especially as children of survivors increasingly journey with a camera into Europe, and into the past. In films of return, the director – frequently a member of the second generation – goes back to the scene of the crime, or of the rescue. Some of these documentaries are investigative, like Loving the Dead, Birthplace, and (to a lesser extent) Shtetl, in which the subjects attempt to find out how their Polish-Jewish parents were murdered. Some are commemorative, such as The Last Days and Bach in Auschwitz. Others are celebratory, like The Children of Chabannes and The Optimists, which chronicle the rescue of Jews in France and Bulgaria. And Photographer utilizes the cinematic medium in fresh ways to explore how ultimately untrustworthy – or at least incomplete – images of the Holocaust can be.