EXCLUSIVE: There can be no doubt about the most important documentary to screen at the Berlin Film Festival this year – one released 40 years ago.
The festival is showing Claude Lanzmann’s monumental Shoah, the nearly-10-hour-long masterwork that explored the Holocaust through “survivors, bystanders and perpetrators across 14 countries.” As the Berlinale program notes, “The film contains no historical footage; instead, it uses interviews to ‘reincarnate’ the Jewish tragedy and revisits the sites where the crimes occurred.”
In conjunction with the anniversary, a new film about Lanzmann and Shoah is premiering at the festival: All I Had Was Nothingness (Je n’avais que le néant), directed by Guillaume Ribot. We have your first look at the film in the clip above. It shows a chilling moment Lanzmann did not include in his original film – a sequence in which neighbors of a suspected war criminal challenge the filmmaker and suggest they have no interest in knowing what their neighbor did during the war.
“In 2023, [Shoah] was added to the UNESCO Memory of the World Register,” the Berlinale observes. “Now, Ribot uses only Lanzmann’s own words drawn from his memoirs and previously unseen excerpts from his filming material to pay homage to one of cinema’s masterpieces and to the director’s relentless pursuit of telling the untold.”
Claude Lanzmann
HBO
Lanzmann would have turned 100 years old this year. He died in 2018 at the age of 92, a year after releasing his final documentary, Napalm, about a visit he made to North Korea that unexpectedly led to a passionate love affair with a nurse. The French-born protean writer and filmmaker was a confidante of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and became romantically attached to de Beauvoir from 1952-59.
Shoah is considered one of the greatest documentaries of all time. “His monumental work – both epic and intimate, immediate and definitive – is a triumph of form and content, uncovering hidden truths while redefining documentary filmmaking,” writes the Berlin Film Festival. “The film recounts the extermination of six million European Jews during the Second World War and gave the event its name in many countries: the Shoah.”
Watch the clip from All I Had Was Nothingness above.