Holofiction

This film is part of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival screenings in JCCSF’s Kanbar Hall.

This dynamic film explores visual representations of the Holocaust through an arresting montage of excerpts from fictional films and TV. With Paolo Marzocchi’s exceptional score and without narration, director Michal Kosakowski presents a hypnotic amalgamation of images, including record players, burning books, radios, and people saying goodbye for the last time. Drawing from an archive of narrative works, the film scrutinizes how Holocaust imagery has been codified in cinema and forces us to examine how we participate in its consumption.

Deftly arranged jump cuts propel us from one striking scene to the next, including eerie juxtapositions in which famous actors, including Ralph Fiennes and Donald  Sutherland, play a Nazi in one clip and a Jew in the next. The film begins with an epigraph from a giant in Holocaust cinema, Claude Lanzmann: “Fiction is a transgression. It is my belief that the depiction of certain things is prohibited.” Holofiction is Kosakowski’s elegiac response to this quote; his artful symphony of scenes from the world’s greatest directors is a testament to how deeply compelled they were to tell an almost untellable story. — Nancy Fishman

Michal Kosakowski (b. 1975) is a Polish-German filmmaker and media artist who grew up in Austria. Working across documentary, fiction, and experimental cinema, his practice examines the aesthetic and ethical boundaries of representation. His films include Just Like the Movies (2006), Fortynine (2007), Zero Killed (2012), German Angst (2015), and Holofiction (2025), which premiered at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival. He is also a Fabrica alumnus and has collaborated on Uli Aigner’s ONE MILLION project since 2014.

Michal Kosakowski, Austria, Germany, 102 min, United States Premiere

All seating is first come, first served.

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