Claude Lanzmann’s Monumental, Essential Shoah Returns with New Trailer and Poster Ahead of Berlinale Showcase

As Berlinale contends and, even worse, complies with the German government’s censorship against expressing Palestinian liberation, the festival programmers are spotlighting perhaps the greatest cinematic work when it comes to illuminating historical persecution and genocide. Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour 1985 masterwork Shoah is part of the 2025 Berlinale Special programme and it will screen alongside the world premiere of Guillaume Ribot’s All I Had Was Nothingness, a new documentary capturing Lanzmann’s 12-year pursuit to tell the untold story of the Holocaust, using only the director’s words and never-before-seen footage.

Ahead of the new screening, mk2 Films has released a new trailer and poster for Shoah, the latter created by acclaimed Polish designer Aleksander Walijewski. “The artwork captures that it is only through the collective gaze of the many individuals featured in the film over the course of its 9 hours and 30 minutes that makes it possible to begin to understand what the Holocaust truly was,” a press release notes.

Here’s the synopsis: “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.”

See the new trailer and poster below.

The post Claude Lanzmann’s Monumental, Essential Shoah Returns with New Trailer and Poster Ahead of Berlinale Showcase first appeared on The Film Stage.