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Marcel Ophuls, Oscar-winning film-maker of The Sorrow and the Pity, dies aged 97

The German-French documentarian, who fled the Nazis twice as a child, spent his career exploring wartime atrocities and conflicts

Marcel Ophuls, the Oscar-winning French film-maker whose documentary The Sorrow and the Pity uncovered the truth of the Vichy government’s collaboration with Nazi Germany during the second world war, has died aged 97. But in 1969, when he submitted The Sorrow and the Pity, a four-and-a-half-hour documentary that exposed the extent of French collaboration with the Nazis, the station refused to screen it and it was banned; a network head later told a government committee that the film “destroys myths that the people of France still need”. The Sorrow and the Pity was nominated for an Academy Award in 1971 for best documentary feature; it was immortalised in Annie Hall as the film Woody Allen’s character invites Diane Keaton to see on a date.

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