JIFF26 Holofiction

Constructed of clips from over 3,000 films and television shows produced between 1938 and the present, Holofiction is an astounding audiovisual collage exploring cultural representations of the Holocaust and how these have shaped and permeated our collective memory.   Taking Claude Lanzmann’s famous statement on the impossibility of Holocaust representation in fiction – “Fiction is a transgression. It is my belief that the depiction of certain things is prohibited” – as its point of departure, Polish-German filmmaker Michael Kosakowski’s cinematic supercut of reconstructs the chronology of the Holocaust through repeated motifs and narrative patterns.  Kosakowski’s hypnotic visual essayist approach invites audiences to query the ethics of depicting atrocities in fictional cinema, and to consider how the endless cinematic reproduction of certain representations shapes collective imaginations and historical memory.  Each session will be preceded by a video introduction from Dr Simon Holloway from the Melbourne Holocaust Museum.