Shoah

Berlinale Special 2025

Twelve years in the making, Claude Lanzmann’s monumental epic on the Holocaust features interviews with survivors, bystanders and perpetrators across 14 countries. The film contains no historical footage; instead, it uses interviews to “reincarnate” the Jewish tragedy and revisits the sites where the crimes occurred. It stemmed from Lanzmann’s concern that the genocide, committed only 40 years earlier, was already fading from memory and that atrocity was being sanitised as history. His monumental work – both epic and intimate, immediate and definitive – is a triumph of form and content, uncovering hidden truths while redefining documentary filmmaking. 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.

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by Claude Lanzmann (Director) France 1985 English, German, Polish, Hebrew 566' Colour & Black/White Rating R 12

Crew

Director	Claude Lanzmann
Cinematography	Dominique Chapuis, Jimmy Glasberg, William Lubtchansky
Editing	Ziva Postec, Anna Ruiz
Producer	Dominique Lanzmann

Produced by

Les Films Aleph

World Sales

mk2 Films

Photos

Claude Lanzmann

Born in Paris, France in 1925, he died in 2016. At high school, he was a member of the Communist Youth Association; from 1943, he was a partisan in the French Resistance. After the end of the war, he studied philosophy in Paris; in 1947, he completed a degree at the University of Tübingen. In 1948/49, he lectured at Freie Universität in West Berlin. He was invited by Jean-Paul Sartre to work on “Les Temps Modernes” magazine and became its editor in 1986. Lanzmann travelled extensively with Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and, like them, supported the Algerian struggle for independence as a journalist. In 1952, he visited Israel for the first time. In 1958, he was a member of a delegation to the People’s Republics of Korea and China. In 1960, as a signatory of the “Manifesto of 121”, which encouraged French soldiers to refuse to serve in the Algerian War, he was arrested and charged. In 1972, he made his first documentary, Israel, Why. In 1973, he began work on Shoah which premiered in Paris in 1985 and screened at Venice and in the International Forum of New Cinema at the 1986 Berlinale. In 1994, the documentary Tsahal concluded his “Jewish trilogy”. From 1997, he released further documentaries from footage shot for Shoah. In 2009, he published his memoirs “Le lièvre de Patagonie”. In 2013, the Berlinale awarded Lanzmann the Honorary Golden Bear for his life’s work and dedicated the Homage to him.

Filmography (documentaries)

1972 Pourquoi Israël 1985 Shoah 1994 Tsahal 1997 Un vivant qui passe (Ein Lebender geht vorbei) 2001 Sobibor, 14 octobre 1943, 16 heures 2008 Lights and Shadows 2010 Le Rapport Karski 2013 Le dernier des injustes (Der Letzte der Ungerechten) 2017 Napalm

Bio- & filmography as of Berlinale 2025