What They Found: Sam Mendes's powerful debut documentary

The Oscar-winning director Sam Mendes's first documentary "is a short, stark shock" that might well contain some of "the most disturbing images ever shown on British TV", said Jack Seale in The Guardian. It is a straightforward combination of two "precious artefacts" from the vaults of London's Imperial War Museum: film footage shot by Sergeants Mike Lewis and Bill Lawrie of the British Army Film and Photographic Unit, documenting the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945; and audio interviews from the 1980s, in which the two cameramen recall the sights they encountered.

It's clear that they had no idea what to expect when they were sent to film a camp for "political prisoners": Lewis, himself Jewish, remembers thinking the assignment would be "dull". But what they witnessed there would "change them and stay with them for ever".

We see bodies in unthinkable numbers, "tossed onto trucks and into pits like mannequins", said Carol Midgley in The Times. Lawrie and Lewis's recollections are voiced quietly, meaning there is nothing to do but "focus on the heinous images in front of you".

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

The sight of all these corpses being "dropped like litter" stays in the mind, said John Nathan in The Jewish Chronicle. What shocks even more is the "easy arrogance" of the "well-fed" German guards left behind after liberation, and tasked with the mass burial of the typhus-ridden cadavers. "As the Holocaust recedes further from living memory," said Dan Einav in the Financial Times, "it's hard to overstate the importance of such films."