Having returned to France in 1950 as a young man, Ophuls was to become famous with his unsparing four and a half hour portrait of France during the War.
When it was shown on the BBC in 1971, the JC review said: “The compelling power of The Sorrow and the Pity lay in its nightmarish insistence on involving us all.”
But it was considered too sensitive a topic for France and was not shown on TV in the country until 1981.
Ophuls then turned his focus onto other conflicts in contemporary Europe. The Troubles We’ve Seen was mainly filmed in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo in 1993 during the Yugoslav Wars. A Sense of Loss documented the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
In 2014, when his autobiographical Ain’t Misbehavin’ was shown at the New York Jewish Film Festival, the Forward reported that there was “no evidence that Jewish observance holds any place in Marcel’s life”.
According to the Guardian, for the last few years, he had been working on a film about Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian Territories under the draft title Unpleasant Truths.
