Arena — Season 1, Episode 207: Roman Vishniac
Documentary • 90 min • 3 seasons, 689 episodes • ★ 7.2/10
Episode synopsis
Roman Vishniac is a Russian Jew born in St Petersburg in 1897. His striking images of life in the Jewish ghettos - taken with a concealed camera just before the last war - are extraordinary documents of a lost epoch and a lost people. ' I returned again and again because I wanted to save their faces from the devastation of Hitler's Germany.' and Arena examines contemporary coverage of the destruction of Lebanon from two points of view: the photo journalist who arrives on assignment for an international agency; and the Lebanese citizen who finds himself compelled to document what is happening to his country.
About Arena
Arena is a British television documentary series, made and broadcast by the BBC. Voted by leading TV executives in Broadcast as one of the top 50 most influential programmes of all time, it has run since 1 October 1975 with over five hundred episodes made, directed by the likes of Martin Scorsese, Alan Yentob, Roly Keating, Frederick Baker, Volker Schlondorff and Vikram Jayanti. Arena's subjects are a roll-call of the world's best known cultural figures from the 20th and 21st centuries, from singers Bob Dylan and Amy Winehouse to academics Edward Said and Eric Hobsbawm, from writers Jean Genet and V S Naipaul to artists Francis Bacon and Louise Bourgeois. The current series editor is Anthony Wall.