Dir: Guilaume Ribot | France, Doc, 94′ 2025
French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann dedicated 12 years of his life to Shoah, a nine-hour groundbreaking expose of the Holocaust. Crossing continents and countries he interviewed survivors, perpetrators and anyone affected by the tragedy. The film, a mammoth endeavour, made between 1976 and 1981, finally reached French cinemas in 1985
Forty years later, the world is commemorating the 80th anniversary of end of the Second World War and what would have been Lanzmann’s 100th birthday. French filmmaker and photographer Guillaume Ribot presents the world premiere of All I Had Was Nothingness.
Ribot’s’ film, shot on a shoestring budget, uses only Lanzmann’s own words drawn from his memoirs and previously unseen excerpts from his filming material to pay homage to one of cinema’s great masterpieces that was added to the UNESCO Memory of the World register in 2023.
All I Had Was Nothingness avoids sentimentality in its startling frankness. The casual evil and candidness makes for a sober watch once again raising the profile of these extraordinary acts of human genocide. An observational work, it offers us the opportunity to see for our own eyes those who witnessed, aided and abetted the Holocaust. Those new to the story, and that’s pretty much all of us, now have the opportunity to experience the oral testaments of Simon Shrebnik, who was shot in the head at close range but escaped to tell his tale; Abraham Bomba who was forced cut women’s hair before they were gassed, and the secretly filmed footage of Nazi war criminal Franz Suchomel, who participated in the euthanasia programme.
Ribot, who is not Jewish, started his filmmaking career with Le Cahier de Susi (2014), an Anne Frank style short documentary charting his own family experience of hiding Jewish children during the Second World War. This sparked a series of films focusing on the Holocaust:; Treblinka (2016) and The Black Book (2019). All I had was Nothingness is an absorbing and worthwhile tribute @MeredithTaylor
BERLINALE 2025 | SPECIAL SCREENINGS 2025