Sorrow and the Pity Blu-Ray

'The Sorrow and the Pity' Director: Marcel Ophuls (1969) Arrow Academy Blu-ray | French and German w/ English Subtitles

Marcel Ophuls' four-and-a-half hour, two-part portrait of the French town of Clermont-Ferrand under German occupation from 1940-44 is one of the greatest documentaries ever made, as important as Claude Lanzmann's Shoah in its value not just as a film but as an essential historical record in its own right not least since its interviewees are all long dead.

Describing the fall of France and the rise of the Resistance, with the aid of newly-shot interviews and eye-opening archive footage including newsreels and propaganda films, Ophuls painstakingly crafts a complex, nuanced picture of what really happened in France over this period.