Night and Fog (1955)

"Night and Fog" is hands down the most disturbing documentary I've ever seen. It literally shook me to my core in its brief 35 minutes examining and then simply looking -- no words needed -- at the concentration camps of World War II Europe where untold millions of Jews, gays and other people were murdered because they didn't fit into Hitler's new world.

That said, this film should be required viewing of every man, woman and child on earth, if I had my way (and I usually don't). Using a mixture of on-location shooting in color and archival black and white footage and photographs, director Alain Resnais spares nothing -- horrific, graphic footage of the dead and near dead is shown in detail -- in his laying out of fact. Living skeletons, skulls smashed apart, heads laying in piles, charred, burning corpses -- "Night and Fog" shows us the absolute reality of absolute evil.

And its writers tell us flatly that they only are skimming the surface with this documentary, that the true horror of life and death under Nazi Germany can never fully be explained or filmed. Absolutely horrifying, absolutely heart-breaking, absolutely unforgettable ... it's a shame humanity seems to have not progressed. A+