MIFF presents
Holofiction
When
Sun 23 Aug 2026
Drawing on thousands of films and TV shows about the Holocaust, this gripping, rigorously crafted supercut queries the ethics of representing atrocity.
“Fiction is a transgression,” stated Claude Lanzmann, maker of the definitive Holocaust documentary, Shoah (MIFF 1987), in reference to Schindler’s List. “It is my belief that the depiction of certain things is prohibited.” And yet, World War II – and, at its core, the mass murder that was perpetrated by the Nazis – remains the most popular historical subject in cinema. Michal Kosakowski’s found-footage essay film takes Lanzmann’s famous statement as its provocative point of departure, assembling clips culled from a corpus of more than 3000 narrative works – from Rome, Open City to Inglourious Basterds – to reveal both the constants and the contradictions of this genre.
A Polish-German filmmaker and artist, Kosakowski previously used a similar but almost inverted approach to the representation of tragedy in his experimental 2006 short Just Like the Movies, which is composed of clips from films whose images, in retrospect, seem to anticipate the September 11 attacks. With Holofiction, Kosawkowski offers a compelling meditation on the not-always-harmonious relationship between history, memory and media – one that resonates far beyond the events depicted on screen.
Content: Melbourne International Film Festival
Beyond merely repeating images of the Holocaust, the film poses the question of what it means that, even eighty years later, this event remains one of the most recurring sources of inspiration for filmmakers.
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