Schindler's List

Schindler's List is a 1993 film about Oskar Schindler, a German businessman who saved the lives of more than a thousand Jewish refugees in Poland during the Holocaust by employing them in his factories. The film was directed by Steven Spielberg, and is based on the novel Schindler's Ark by Australian novelist Thomas Keneally. It stars Liam Neeson as Schindler, Ralph Fiennes as SS officer Amon Göth, and Ben Kingsley as Schindler's Jewish accountant. The film was a huge box office success and won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Score. In 2007, the American Film Institute ranked the film 8th on its list of the 100 best American films of all time.

Schindler's List won great acclaim from many of Spielberg's peers. Filmmaker Billy Wilder reportedly wrote a long letter of thanks to Spielberg in which he said: "They couldn't have gotten a better man. This movie is absolutely perfection." Filmmaker Quentin Tarantino commented that Schindler's List left him "shaken" and that "even though I have seen many films about the Holocaust, none up to that point had managed to get at the feeling of what it was like to be in the inside of a concentration camp." The film was well received in Israel, where it is aired on public television every year on Holocaust Memorial Day, unedited, uncensored and without commercial breaks.