1. Shoah
You'll never be quite the same after seeing Shoah. Claude Lanzmann's nine-and-a-half-hour epic is a brutally unflinching trip down the darkest corners of memory lane, revisiting the atrocities of the Holocaust and leaving no stone un-turned: no matter how ugly. Using hidden cameras, Lanzmann confronts a variety of individuals across Poland and discovers the roles they played during the Nazi's Jewish purge. Some of the interviews are sickening. Many are gut-wrenching. And every single one of them is hideously chilling. So many people refuse to dwell on the subject of the Holocaust, but Shoah does exactly that. Lanzmann's camera sits on the sites of Polish extermination camps and intermingles this footage with the interviews, amounting to such a richly-drawn account of Nazism in Poland that it is often difficult to watch. One interviewee - an elderly barber who was forced to cut the hair of Jews before they entered the gas chambers - is tentatively pressed by Lanzmann to reveal what he saw in the death camps. He reaches a point where he cannot go on, and pleads with Lanzmann to stop: "Don't make me go on, please". Landsmann responds calmly but firmly: "Please. We must go on". It is one of the most haunting scenes in one of the scariest documentary films that you will ever see.