The documentary explores the 12-year journey undertaken by Claude Lanzmann to make his 1985 film Shoah, a nine-and-a-half-hour-long documentary about the Holocaust. In the film Lanzmann details the practical and emotional challenges he faced from 1973–85, explaining his efforts to convince traumatized death camp survivors to recount their Second World War experiences, tracking down and secretly filming SS Officers as well as his difficulties in composing into a single cohesive narrative more than 200 hours of material he collected.
