Special Screening

The year 2025 marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and the end of World War II—a war in which six million European Jews were exterminated by the Germans. In recognition of this anniversary, the organizers of Timeless Film Festival Warsaw have chosen to screen the rarely shown and hard-to-find film Shoah by French director Claude Lanzmann. Premiering in Paris on April 30, 1985—exactly 40 years ago—Shoah is widely regarded as one of the most significant films of the 20th century. Lanzmann himself would have turned 100 this year.

Shoah is a monumental, nine-and-a-half-hour-long “train of memory for the victims of the Holocaust” (a phrase coined by Tadeusz Lubelski). The film took twelve years to make, with five years dedicated to editing alone. Filming took place between 1974 and 1981 at the sites of former death camps. Lanzmann believed that cinema should not attempt to recreate the Holocaust, as it is impossible to act out or depict. Instead, his approach was to focus the camera on the eyes of those who experienced it firsthand. The film contains no archival footage, no historical photographs. Instead, survivors, bystanders, and even perpetrators speak. While landscapes—with their empty spaces, stone monuments, overgrown fields, and abandoned railway tracks—serve as silent witnesses. In this way, the director wanted to reconstruct traumatic memories and ask questions about the nature of memory. The film is more concerned with the memory of the Holocaust than with historical facts.

Lanzmann made Shoah out of fear that the genocide, committed just 40 years earlier, was already fading from memory, and that the crime was being absolved and treated as distant history. His uncompromising, monumental work is both epic and intimate, direct and definitive. It is a triumph of both form and content, exposing hidden truths while redefining the art of filmmaking.

Roman Gutek