Screening of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and after-screening discussion

Shoah, dir. Claude Lanzmann, France, 1985

Shoah (Heb. שואה – total annihilation, destruction)

The year 2025 marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau and the end of World War II, during which Nazi Germany carried out the extermination of six million European Jews. In remembrance, the Timeless Film Festival Warsaw presents a rarely screened and hard-to-access masterpiece by French director Claude Lanzmann: Shoah, which premiered 40 years ago. For many, Shoah is one of the most important cinematic works of the 20th century. Lanzmann would have turned 100 this year.

Shoah is a monumental, nine-and-a-half-hour-long “threnody for the victims of the Holocaust” (as film historian Tadeusz Lubelski described it). It took twelve years to make, including five years of editing. The footage was shot between 1974 and 1981 at the sites of former death camps. According to Lanzmann, cinema should not attempt to reenact the Holocaust because it is beyond representation. His formal concept was to point the camera at the eyes of those who, in different ways, experienced the Holocaust. There is not a single archival photograph or historical film clip in Shoah. Instead, the film is made up of the voices of survivors, bystanders, and perpetrators. Landscapes also speak – the emptiness of space, forgotten or repressed places, stone memorials, forests, fields, and railroad tracks. The director sought to reconstruct traumatic memories and pose a fundamental question about the nature of remembrance. Shoah is more about the memory of the Holocaust than about historical facts.

The film is not about Jewish survival, escape, or acts of rescue. “I was interested in those who lived as witnesses to death. […] I did not make a film about Poland, or about Jews who were saved, or even about those who saved them. The subject of my film was death – death in the gas vans of Chełmno, in the gas chambers of Bełżec, Treblinka, Sobibór, Majdanek, and Auschwitz,” Lanzmann said in an interview for Gazeta Wyborcza (24.03.2010).

Shoah was born from Lanzmann’s fear that the genocide, committed just forty years earlier, was already fading from memory, and that the crime was being forgiven and reduced to mere history.

Roman Gutek

Screening of Shoah during Timeless Film Festival Warsaw (total runtime: 9 hours 28 minutes):

Part I (4h 35min): Saturday, April 12, 2025 – 14:00, Kino Muranów

Part II (4h 53min): Sunday, April 13, 2025 – 14:00, Kino Muranów

Sunday, April 13, 2025, around 19:00, Kino Muranów Gerard – following the second part of the film Shoah:

Memory as Medium. Art as Testimony A conversation inspired by Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah

This post-screening conversation will focus on the role of memory – both individual and collective – and the ways in which it can be preserved and transformed into artistic medium. The participants will reflect on how film, literature and art can help convey experiences for which no direct witnesses remain.

Guests:

Patrycja Dołowy — writer, artist, and social activist. Author of several books (including Rozmowy z dziećmi Holokaustu) and projects addressing memory, identity, and the heritage of Polish Jews.

Aleksandra Janus — anthropologist, researcher, and cultural project curator. Vice-President of the Zapomniane Foundation, which works to locate and commemorate unmarked graves of Holocaust victims.

Mikołaj Grynberg — writer and photographer. Author of books exploring the contemporary experience of Jews in Poland, including Oskarżam Auschwitz and Jezus umarł w Polsce. In 2021, he debuted as a film director with Proof of Identity, excerpts of which are featured in the core exhibition at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews.

Moderator:

Jakub Duszyński — Artistic Director at Gutek Film, director of a short documentary on memory, to be presented in June 2025 at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews.