HOLOFICTION Celebrates U.S. Premiere at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival
We are delighted to announce the U.S. Premiere of HOLOFICTION at the 46th San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, presented by the Jewish Film Institute in association with San Francisco Cinematheque.
www.sfcinematheque.org
www.jfi.org
The film will screen twice as the festival's Centerpiece Documentary:
Sunday, July 26, 2026 – 5:00 PM
Kanbar Hall, Jewish Community Center of San Francisco (JCCSF)Monday, July 27, 2026 – 12:00 PM
Piedmont Theatre, Oakland
Directed by Michal Kosakowski, HOLOFICTION is a 102-minute essay film that explores how the Holocaust has been represented, repeated and codified in fiction cinema over the past eight decades. Constructed entirely from excerpts of hundreds of feature films and television productions, accompanied by Paolo Marzocchi’s original orchestral score, the film invites audiences to reflect on the power of cinematic images in shaping collective memory.
The San Francisco screenings mark another important milestone in the international festival journey of HOLOFICTION, following its world premiere at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival and subsequent presentations at leading festivals across Europe, Israel and North America.
Director Michal Kosakowski will attend the U.S. premiere in person and participate in Q&A discussions with the audience after both screenings.
We are honored to bring HOLOFICTION to one of the world's leading Jewish film festivals and look forward to engaging with audiences in San Francisco and Oakland.
Download the Official Program Guide
“This dynamic film explores visual representations of the Holocaust through an arresting montage of excerpts from fictional films and TV. With Paolo Marzocchi’s exceptional score and without narration, director Michal Kosakowski presents a hypnotic amalgamation of images, including record players, burning books, radios, and people saying goodbye for the last time. Drawing from an archive of narrative works, the film scrutinizes how Holocaust imagery has been codified in cinema and forces us to examine how we participate in its consumption.
Deftly arranged jump cuts propel us from one striking scene to the next, including eerie juxtapositions in which famous actors, including Ralph Fiennes and Donald Sutherland, play a Nazi in one clip and a Jew in the next. The film begins with an epigraph from a giant in Holocaust cinema, Claude Lanzmann: “Fiction is a transgression. It is my belief that the depiction of certain things is prohibited.” Holofiction is Kosakowski’s elegiac response to this quote; his artful symphony of scenes from the world’s greatest directors is a testament to how deeply compelled they were to tell an almost untellable story.“
—Nancy Fishman
