Christian Delage and Cardozo Law Students Interview Dan Leshem, Associate Director of Research

USC Shoah Foundation’s associate director of research, Dan Leshem, participated in Cardozo School of Law’s Law and Film course taught by documentary filmmaker/historian Christian Delage on Sept. 29.

The course is titled “Mass Crimes: The Place of the Witness.” To learn about the role of film in representing and interpreting law, history and memory, students watch footage of war trials and testimonies from USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive and the Fortunoff Video Archive at Yale University. Students also film their own interviews with experts in the field and they have the option of creating their own video projects.

Delage has directed several documentary films about the Holocaust and the Nuremberg trials, including Nuremberg: Nazis Facing Their Crimes and From Hollywood to Nuremberg: John Ford, Samuel Fuller, George Stevens, and has published several books on the subject. He visited USC Shoah Foundation in 2007 to do research in the Visual History Archive for the Compiegne transit camp memorial in France.

During the interview, Leshem spoke about USC Shoah Foundation’s mission and the history, present and future of testimony.

USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive contains 52,000 audiovisual testimonies of survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides. The testimonies were conducted in 57 countries in 33 languages.