HOLOFICTION at the 2nd Leiden Essay Film Festival

 
 
 

September 20, 2026 – 10:00 AM
Cinema Kijkhuis, Leiden (Netherlands)

HOLOFICTION was screened at the 2nd Leiden Essay Film Festival (leff) in Leiden, the Netherlands, which took place from September 19 to 22, 2026 at Cinema Kijkhuis and Museum De Lakenhal. leff is the first festival in the Netherlands dedicated entirely to the essay film; its second edition presented 44 essay films – features and shorts – from more than 20 countries, combining recent work with landmarks from the history of the genre.

HOLOFICTION was shown on Sunday, September 20, 2026, at 10:00 AM in Cinema 1 of Cinema Kijkhuis as part of the festival thread “Film on Film”. The thread brought together ten essay films that turn toward the medium of cinema itself and the countless images it has produced – among them Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself, Ross McElwee’s Remake, Herman Asselberghs’ Leçon d’objet, John Smith’s Being John Smith and Radu Jude and Adrian Cioflânca’s Shot Reverse Shot.

About the Film – leff Programme Text

“The question whether the Holocaust can be represented through fiction has haunted filmmakers and scholars for decades, perhaps most famously by Claude Lanzmann’s insistence that this extreme event resists representation altogether. Holofiction faces the question with surprising self-evidence by compositing all the fictional images that cinema has already produced. Drawing on more than 3,000 fiction films and television productions made between the late 1930s and the present, Polish-German filmmaker Michal Kosakowski constructed a feature-length montage in which recurring visual motifs gradually emerge. Cattle cars, striped uniforms, barbed wire, selections on the platform, the gates of Auschwitz: repeated across decades of filmmaking, these images reveal how a cinematic vocabulary has taken shape.

While Holofiction recalls certain tendencies of structural cinema, Kosakowski’s work is also motivated by reflection and critical inquiry: he describes his interest as less an investigation of individual films than of the collective image archive they have produced and that continues to shape historical consciousness today. Without dismissing fiction’s capacity to bear witness, Holofiction also asks us what happens when representation itself becomes conventionalised. It demonstrates how cinema continuously constructs and reconstructs the past, but rather than closing the discussion, it invites viewers to look again at images they may have thought they knew.”

leff – HOLOFICTION (English) · leff – HOLOFICTION (Nederlands)

Event Details

Screening: Sunday, September 20, 2026, 10:00 AM – 12:15 PM
Venue: Cinema Kijkhuis, Cinema 1, Vrouwenkerksteeg 10, Leiden
Programme: Thread “Film on Film”
Festival: 2nd Leiden Essay Film Festival (leff), September 19–22, 2026
Festival venues: Cinema Kijkhuis and Museum De Lakenhal, Leiden
Festival opening: Saturday, September 19, 2026, Museum De Lakenhal, with a lecture by filmmaker and researcher Kevin B. Lee

About the Festival

The Leiden Essay Film Festival is a joint initiative of the Discursive Film Foundation, Leiden University’s Academy of Creative and Performing Arts (ACPA) and the lectorate FILM of the University of the Arts The Hague (KABK). The festival is produced in cooperation with Cinema Kijkhuis / Bioscopen Leiden and Museum De Lakenhal. The 2026 edition was made possible with the support of the Municipality of Leiden, Cultuurfonds Zuid-Holland, Fonds 21 and VEVAM.

 
Michal Kosakowski