Holofiction - Jewish International Film Festival 2026
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https://www.jiff.com.au/films/holofiction
Date Reviewed: 25/10/2026
Reviewed by Barry Hill
There has long been a movement claiming that the Holocaust is fiction and did not happen in spite of photographic and eye witness evidence.
This movement is called Holocaust denial. It falsely claims that the Nazi genocide of six million Jews is a lie, or that it has been greatly exaggerated. Historians have called it a form of antisemitism, and not a legitimate debate.
The evidence for the Holocaust is drawn from Nazi records and correspondence, photographs and film, physical sites and forensic evidence, survivor and perpetrator testimony, and records from the Allied liberation of camps.
Holofiction is not a film about the denial of the Holocaust, it is a 2025 experimental documentary by Polish-German filmmaker Michal Kosakowski. It is a silent montage gathered from thousands of excerpts from fictional films and TV shows made from 1938 onward.
By comparing images of everyday events, victims and perpetrators across different productions, the film examines how cinema has represented and repeated Holocaust imagery and poses questions about the differences in the images portrayed.
Accompanying these confronting images is the original score is by Paolo Marzocchi. Marzocchi’s score which is sparse but masterful letting the film clips speak for themselves and also adding to the silent drama.
These clips start with - the streets and markets of the 1930s, the buses, the kitchens, sewing, ironing, laundry, children's games, merry-go-rounds, family life, preparations for festive meals, the "Jew" stamp, the swastika, the Star of David, the hiding place, the departure for the concentration camp.
Then continue with - Nazi vehicles and motorcycles, arrests, pursuits, escape attempts, people climbing into trucks, farewells, departures in the wagons, overcrowding, rails, locomotives, the ramp at Auschwitz, the ghettoization of cities, of Babi Yar, striped prison uniforms, illness, death, resistance, weeping, fear, despair, watchtowers, barracks and roll calls.
It climaxes with - the taking of pictures, guard dogs, humiliation, survival in the camps, the soup bowls, the bread, the cutting of hair, the real showers, toasts, torture and the death sentence, the brutality of the pouring of Zyklon through the openings in the prison roof, the connecting of the exhaust pipe of the gas vans. the death of musicians, the destruction of musical instruments, crowds heading towards the gas chamber building.
Then at the end - hope, radio sets, clandestine listening to the radio to the news of the downfall of the Nazi party.
It is interesting that the actual executions are not shown and confronting footage of hanging is shown upside down. Equally interesting is that we move from a scene in which an actor plays the Nazi to a similar scene in another film in which the same actor plays the Jew.
There is a Claude Lanzmann quote at the end of the film, "Fiction is a transgression; I deeply believe there is a prohibition on representation". He may be right, but that only encourages one to watch the film more than once, pausing on certain scenes to question which is the ‘correct’ interpretation.
Holofiction is a thought-provoking watch which is sure to have each viewer deciding how the images cinema presents have influenced the way we imagine the Holocaust.