REMEMBER BELSEN + Q&A with director FRANK SHIELDS - Randwick Ritz Cinemas 25 June

Editor's Note: Frank Shields has been making films since the early 1970s. His documentary on Breaker Morant (1974) won numerous awards and his 1986 film The Surfer  was selected as an official entry in the Cannes Film Festival.

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To mark the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, Frank Shields invites you join him on 25th June for a powerful evening at Ritz Cinemas screening the thought-provoking documentary, REMEMBER BELSEN. The film includes footage locked away for 40 years, deemed too shocking for public release by British and American authorities. 

 TO BOOK TICKETS CLICK HERE:

VIEW TRAILER

REMEMBER BELSEN (2025, 105 minutes) is an eyewitness documentary, featuring interviews with five Jewish survivors, a cameraman who recorded the camp’s liberation, and Australian war artist Alan Moore, the first to record the horrors of the BERGEN-BELSEN camp.

British liberators entering the camp on April 15, 1945 found thousands of unburied corpses. Too ill to recover, 13,000 inmates died after liberation, with the official end of the war in Europe only weeks away. Reeling from the first images of Nazi concentrations camps, the world was shocked beyond belief by the horrors of Bergen-Belsen.

Around 50,000 persons died there, including diarist Anne Frank and her sister Margot. Most of the victims were Jews. The unimaginable intentional horror and the extraordinary British rescue operation were international headlines and Bergen-Belsen became a byword for evil.

Frank Shield’s film reflects on the experiences of camp inmates to convey the full horror of the Holocaust. In a moving counterpoint, the film records a reunion between two Jewish survivors, Olga Horak and Helen Schon and war artist, Alan Moore.

Streaming at the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival - Peter Tammer draws attention to REMEMBERING BELSEN (Frank Shields, Australia, 2022)

War artist at Belsen

Editor's Note:

This piece below originally appeared on Peter Tammer's blog and is being republished here to hopefully give more attention to Frank Shields' new documentary prior to its forthcoming streaming screenings via the Melbourne Documentatry Film Festival.

Peter Writes: 

Recently I received an email from Frank Shields an old friend I met about 50 years ago. At that time Frank was trying to make a film about Australian soldiers who participated in the Boer War. As luck would have it I was selected to be the sound recordist for some of the interviews which Frank conducted with these fellows who were in their nineties. Then Frank and I met again via Facebook about three years ago, when he told me he was trying to get up another film project which he has recenlty completed: "Remember Belsen".

Frank is unstoppable! Not even Covid and the long periods of the lockdowns could prevent him from making this film. He sent me these notes which were prepared by Carmela Baranowska, a fine young woman whom I taught about 25 years ago when she was a doco student at VCA.

Writer/Director/Producer Frank Shields: A window into the Holocaust...What should we remember? Or, What does Remember Belsen mean? On viewing there will be no doubt about the answer to either question. Will the viewer compare Belsen with Rwanda, Cambodia or even Ukraine. This film will spark debate.' The Melbourne Documentary Film Festival

From Frank:

I did an interview with Paul Harris for his Filmbuff podcast and one of the audience at the Sydney Film Museum who did translation work on James Dean Le Sueur’s award winning film, “The Art of Dissent” wrote a testimonial: 

Frank Shields introduces Remembering Belsen 
at  a screening at the Sydney Jewish Museum

"So amazed to have unexpectedly met director Frank Shields & some survivor protagonists at Sydney's premiere of Remember Belsen - a moving homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s long-buried film F3080, whose footage of the camp's liberation was considered to be too horrific for the post-war healing public to see. Now that it has been sensitively reworked, however, including vignettes from Australian author Nadia Wheatley & war artist Alan Moore, it should now be a permanent testament to that human experience of world significance. Originally pitched at 75 minutes, its 110 minute screening does not falter. Alena Jirasek, Czlink,Translator Services.

Click here to see the TRAILER for my film:

Good news is, you can see my film without leaving your living room, for my film is showing online at MDFF until end of July.  

 watch.eventive.org/mdff  

Open link, go to the Australian documentary button and scroll to Remember Belsen.

If you have any problems with links please let know. Thanks for spreading the news.

Frank