USC Shoah Foundation Partners with Filmmaker Addison Sandoval on “Live Another Day”
Solitary confinement, survival, and the architecture of resistance—reimagining testimony through film
Live Another Day (2015), directed and written by Addison Sandoval for the USC Shoah Foundation, is a historical documentary that reconstructs the psychological and physical reality of solitary confinement in Nazi Germany through survivor testimony, archival context, and a carefully controlled cinematic grammar. Rather than approaching World War II from an aerial or didactic vantage, the film situates the audience at eye level with a single political prisoner whose day-to-day survival reveals the mechanics of authoritarian control and the quiet labor of resistance.
At its core, the film examines three interlocking forces:
The machinery of dehumanization: bureaucratic procedures, spatial design, surveillance, and enforced isolation that weaponize time and silence.
The technologies of memory: ritual, small acts of self-preservation, and sensory anchors—light, sound, breath—as countermeasures to erasure.
The ethics of witnessing: how stories are preserved and transmitted, and how cinema can safeguard historical truth against distortion.
Sandoval interlaces first-person accounts and historically grounded detail with restrained, observational staging. The film’s visual language draws from noir traditions not for stylization, but for dialectical clarity: hard lines and high contrast illuminate the stark moral architecture of oppression. The cell’s geometry—its angles, shadows, and thresholds—functions as an evidentiary space. Sound design carries particular evidentiary weight: footsteps tracing the rhythms of authority; the metallic report of keys; the staccato of distant doors; the slow drip of water marking time’s hostile expansion. Sparse, pointed narration and text-on-screen provide historical scaffolding without overwhelming the subjective experience at the film’s heart.
The documentary’s temporal structure breaks the prison day into discrete, rigorously observed movements: wakefulness, inspection, deprivation, recollection, punishment, endurance. Within this cadence, the prisoner’s interior world becomes a site of stubborn autonomy. Memory—of family, names, places, language—operates as a counter-archive to the state’s ledgers and files. Each act of remembering is framed as both protest and preservation: an assertion that the individual cannot be reduced to a number, nor history to a statistic.
Live Another Day also interrogates the transmission of trauma and testimony across generations. In carefully calibrated interludes, the film contextualizes solitary confinement within broader Nazi carceral practices and political purges, tracing how targeted repression seeks not only to break bodies but to recalibrate public memory. By foregrounding the microphysics of daily survival, the documentary challenges audiences to recognize the systemic logic that enables atrocities—how ordinary procedures, carried out with cold regularity, facilitate extraordinary harm.
Taken together, the film advances a thesis both historical and contemporary: authoritarianism does not begin with spectacle; it begins with small, normalized violences. And against those, survival—breathing, remembering, refusing—becomes both a moral act and a historical record.
Reception
Live Another Day has been noted in academic, legal, and community forums for its disciplined minimalism, ethical clarity, and pedagogical utility. Educators and researchers have cited the film’s focus on spatial design, ritualized control, and the phenomenology of confinement as valuable for coursework in modern European history, Holocaust and genocide studies, carceral theory, human rights, and documentary ethics. Its tight, immersive scope—eschewing overproduction in favor of experiential density—has been recognized for facilitating discussion on primary versus secondary evidence in historical storytelling, the role of cinema in safeguarding memory, and the dangers of euphemistic bureaucratic language.
Screening Q&As and seminars have highlighted:
The film’s sound-led evidentiary strategy and how auditory cues function as historical texture, not mere mood.
The value of centering a single subject-position to illuminate systemic truths without collapsing individual specificity into abstraction.
The interplay between cinematic reconstruction and archival rigor, and the responsibilities filmmakers bear when visualizing historical trauma.
Beyond formal settings, audience responses have emphasized the work’s lingering moral impact: an insistence that the “ordinary” shapes of oppression—paperwork, patrols, protocol—must be recognized and resisted wherever they appear. For many viewers, the film becomes a compact but resonant touchstone, revisited in discussions about contemporary detention practices, political prisoners, and the preservation of testimony in an era of disinformation.
Live Another Day stands as a meticulous, human-scale contribution to historical documentary practice: a film that refuses spectacle in favor of witness, and that honors survival not as a passive condition but as a deliberate, daily choice to live—another hour, another day—and to remember.
Visit the USC Shoah Foundation to engage deeply with survivor testimony, educational resources, and ongoing efforts to confront antisemitism. Continue the work of remembrance by watching Live Another Day and sharing it with someone who needs to see it.