There must be more fulfilling jobs than being a librarian in the municipal library of Zugdidi in Georgia. Actually, from what “Biblioteka” shows one would not even assume that these women are working and that their workplace is a library. The number of employees seems to exceed the number of visitors by far. They chat, gossip and scream, someone is hammering away on a piano, people are eating and drinking in the reading rooms, doors are banged – high drama in an institute that ought to be filled with silence and concentration. All these unusual and agitated goings-on cover up the real state of the library. But the short breaks in the racket or the views of the frequently decrepit rooms with their crumbling plaster and bare concrete floors reveal that this place is an anachronism, a remnant of another system, another age. Its only remaining function may be as a meeting point for the librarians, who wouldn’t be more than remnants themselves without this place.

When the first concentration camps were liberated in 1945, the Allied cameramen’s assignment was to document the events systematically – a record of the inconceivable. The images they produced were so grim and horrifying that much of what we have seen in this context probably pales in comparison. On the basis of this material, renowned filmmakers like Sidney Bernstein, Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder and Stewart McAllister produced a documentary with the revelatory subtitle “No German can say he didn’t know”.
The political agenda of German reconstruction prevented its publication – reels vanished or ended up in archives, where they lay untouched for decades. Now the Imperial War Museum has managed to reconstruct the film almost completely. Supplemented by testimonies of contemporary witnesses, “Night Will Fall” is a haunting reflection of the story of this documentary film and one of the darkest chapters of the 20th century.

A large group of young people in liturgical robes look at the audience, wave their arms and chant “Aaah, hoooo!” Their entranced faces as they sing and pray could be irritating, just like their fairly unusual career aspirations: these people want to become pastors. In remarkable contrast to such irritations and certainly suitable to qualify some prejudices, the aspiring ministers seem anything but entranced. The seminar they attend seems almost like a therapy group. They want to take up this profession because they believe in God, but surely also because their biographies are the way they are. They talk more openly about their lives than many would have expected – especially considering that the filmmakers call themselves atheists and don’t hesitate to ask critical questions. This creates a striking look at religiousness, concepts of humanity and life plans – and somehow even a consensus between the different perspectives in front of and behind the lens.