His maternal grandparents are Yankel and Perl Grobermann, who emigrated from Bessarabia. His family suffered from the Nazi regime during World War I. Lanzmann was the chief editor of the journal Les Temps Modernes, founded by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Lanzmann's first film, Israel, Why - a collection of in-depth interviews that offer a glimpse of the state 25 years after its establishment-was released in 1973. That film was the stepping-stone to Shoah, his most-acclaimed work. After Israel, Why was re- leased, the Foreign Ministry in Israel asked him to create a film on theHolocaust. The film consumed the next 1 years of his life. Perhaps the most-notable aspect of Shoah is that, in nine-and-a-half hours, there is no use of archival footage of the war or the concentration camps. It constitutes rather an oral history, an assemblage of interviews with survivors, bystanders, and those who aided the Nazi effort to extermi- nate the Jews. Those deeply personal firsthand descriptions were unlike any previous account of the Holocaust. In some cases, Lanzmann had his intervieweesreenact their experiences. He also resorted to deception in order to attain interviews with those un- willing to participate, sometimes employing a fake identity or using a hidden camera. Along with the film's release, Lanzmann published Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust (1985), a complete transcript of the interviews.