Holofiction is a feature length experimental film that explores the visual representation of the Holocaust through a montage of thousands of excerpts from fictional films and television series produced between 1938 and the present. Drawing from an extensive archive of over 3,000 narrative works the film critically examines how Holocaust imagery has been codified and reproduced in cinema across decades. Through its essayistic approach, Holofiction invites audiences to reflect on the ethics and responsibility of cinematic storytelling, urging a deeper understanding of how these representations shape collective memory and historical perception.
Country
Poland, GermanyYear
2025Length
102'
Category
ExperimentalScreenplay
Michal KosakowskiEditing
Michal KosakowskiMusic
Paolo MarzocchiSound
Andrea VeneriProduction
Uli Aigner, Michal Kosakowski / KOSAKOWSKI FILMSDistribution
KOSAKOWSKI FILMS, BerlinSynopsis
Biography
Michal Kosakowski (1975) is a Polish-German filmmaker and media artist whose work spans documentary, fiction, and experimental film. His award-winning films Just Like the Movies (2006) and Zero Killed (2012) explore the construction of images and the crossing of moral and societal boundaries. He co-directed German Angst (2015). His latest work, Holofiction, is part of the multimedia art project Dark Tourism.
Statement
“Fiction is a transgression. It is my belief that the depiction of certain things is prohibited.” – Claude Lanzmann (1925–2018), on the possibility of representing the Shoah in fiction, upon the release of Schindler’s List (1993).
Using this statement as a point of departure, my film reconstructs the chronology of the Holocaust through images drawn entirely from cinema. World War II and the Holocaust are among the most frequently portrayed historical events in film history. The sheer volume of fictionalized material created around them is immense. It is precisely the tension between Lanzmann’s call for a prohibition against fictionalizing the Holocaust and the existence of a vast body of such fictions that inspired my research—and ultimately led to the creation of an experimental film composed of cinematic depictions that, in Lanzmann’s view, should never have been made. My film also aims to expose and interrogate the iconographic patterns that persist in cinematic representations of the Holocaust. By assembling and juxtaposing scenes from a wide range of film archives, I seek to examine how notions of authenticity are constructed and repeated in our visual memory of historical events.
— Michal Kosakowski
Archival materials
The complete history of World War II and Holocaust cinema from 1938 to the present.
Screenings
