Blu-ray Release: Shoah

Blu-ray Release Date: Sept. 15, 2026
Price: Blu-ray $99.95
Studio: Criterion

Over a decade in the making, Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour-plus 1985 documentary opus Shoah is a monumental investigation of the unthinkable: the murder of more than six million Jews by the Nazis.

Using no archival footage, Lanzmann instead focuses on first-person testimonies (of survivors and former Nazis, as well as other witnesses), employing a circular, free-associative method in assembling them. The intellectual yet emotionally overwhelming Shoah (the Hebrew word for “holocaust”) is not a film about excavating the past but an intensive portrait of the ways in which the past is always present.

Shoah remains, inarguably, one of the most important cinematic works of all time.

Previously issued on DVD by New Yorker way back in 2003 and then on DVD and Blu-ray by Criterion in 2013, Shoah has been out of print for a couple of years, but is now returning on Blu-ray.

The four-disc set contain the following features:

• 2K digital restoration with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
• Three additional films by director Claude Lanzmann: A Visitor from the Living (1999, 68 minutes); Sobibór, October 14, 1943, 4 p.m. (2001, 102 minutes); and The Karski Report (2010, 49 minutes)
• Conversation between Lanzmann and critic Serge Toubiana
• Interview with Lanzmann from 2003 about A Visitor from the Living and Sobibór
• Interview with Caroline Champetier, assistant cameraperson on Shoah, and filmmaker Arnaud Desplechin
• All I Had Was Nothingness (2025), a new film by Guillaume Ribot, edited from previously unreleased footage and recounting the production of Shoah
• Trailer
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• An essay by critic Kent Jones and writings by Lanzmann