HOLOFICTION – Polish Premiere at Krakow Film Festival (International Documentary Competition)

We are excited to announce that HOLOFICTION will celebrate its Polish premiere in the International Documentary Competition at the Krakow Film Festival — one of Europe’s most renowned festivals for documentary cinema.

Film Shapes Memory

Were you aware that from 1938 to the present day, several thousand feature films have been made about the World War II and the Holocaust? Celebrated, Oscar-winning blockbusters, ambitious auteur statements, and long-forgotten modest pieces have more in common than you might assume. In his extraordinary video essay, Michal Kosakowski gets rid of superfluous commentary, juxtaposing thousands of similar film fragments to construct an utterly unique narrative about a cinema that governs our collective imagination.

HOLOFICTION can be viewed on multiple levels. As an arranged collage of both familiar and lesser-known cinematic images; as an account of the Holocaust refracted through the prism of narrative cinema; or even as an intellectual meditation on the moment when victim becomes executioner – much like the characters portrayed by Daniel Olbrychski and Christoph Waltz.

The screening of HOLOFICTION will be accompanied by a KFF Talks event What Images Do to Us, held under the patronage of the International Federation of Film Critics, FIPRESCI. The discussion will feature the Polish-German documentarian Michal Kosakowski (the film’s director), film scholar Dr Bartosz Kwieciński (author of Obrazy i klisze. Między biegunami wizualnej pamięci Zagłady [Images and Clichés: Between Opposite Extremes of the Visual Memory of the Shoah]), and fellow film critics.

SCREENING 1
Mon, June 1 – 17:30
MOS – MOS 1
Q&A with the filmmaker

SCREENING 2
Thu, June 4 – 12:00
MIKRO

The 66th Krakow Film Festival will take place from May 31 to June 7, 2026.

KFF Talks:  What Do Images Do to Us?

June 2 - 17:30 | Pałac Potockich

The German-Austrian film essay Holofiction, which is screened at the KFF in the International Documentary Competition, will serve as a starting point for a discussion on how cinema influences our perception of reality. It will explore how cinema consciously or unconsciously shapes our view of the world and manipulates us. Michał Kosakowski’s documentary, composed of several thousand fragments of feature films, illustrates the repetitive patterns of depicting the Holocaust on screen using only images and no commentary. These patterns have contributed to the consolidation of collective perceptions on the subject. However, today we find ourselves at a different juncture, as we are now shaped not only by cinematic fictions or conventions, but also by digitally generated images that mimic reality. How will this affect our perception of cinema and filmmakers' responsibilities? What does this technological and cultural revolution mean for feature filmmakers, and for documentary filmmakers?
The discussion will feature Polish-German documentary filmmaker Michał Kosakowski (director of Holofiction), film scholar Dr Bartosz Kwieciński (author of the book Images and Clichés: Between the Poles of Visual Memory of the Holocaust) and film critics.
Moderator: Anita Piotrowska

Patronage: FIPRESCI