Schindler’s List ranks among the most powerful and honored films in motion-picture history. The movie was directed by Steven Spielberg and released in 1993. Schindler’s List deals in a realistic and unsentimental way with the Holocaust, the systematic destruction of the Jews by the Nazis during the early 1940’s.
Despite its grim subject matter, Schindler’s List was a tremendous box-office success internationally. It won the Academy Award as best picture of the year, and Spielberg won an Oscar as best director. The motion picture also won five other Academy Awards and was nominated for five more.
The movie was adapted from the novel Schindler’s Ark (1982), published in the United States as Schindler’s List, by the Australian writer Thomas Keneally. The novelist based his work on the true story of Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist. Schindler bribed and persuaded the Nazis to allow him to employ more than 1,000 Jews in his factories during World War II (1939-1945). He thus saved them from almost certain death. Although Schindler was the hero of the story, he was a complex character who enjoyed affairs with women and tried to use the war for personal profit.
Critics praised Schindler’s List for its documentary tone, enhanced by black-and-white photography. The film was also admired for its success in portraying the Holocaust without either sensationalizing or minimizing its horrors. Spielberg filmed the movie on location in Poland, near the original Auschwitz concentration camp where thousands of Jews were killed during the Holocaust.
The cast featured the Northern Ireland actor Liam Neeson as Schindler, the British actor Ben Kingsley as his Jewish accountant, and the British actor Ralph Fiennes as an evil Nazi officer who brutally supervises a concentration camp.
See also Keneally, Thomas ; Schindler, Oskar ; Spielberg, Steven .
