Dir/Wri: Boaz Dvir | France Doc 101′
Some documentaries uncover forgotten history. To Kill a Nazi uncovers a story so astonishing that, were it presented as fiction, audiences might accuse the screenwriter of going over the top.
Director Boaz Dvir’s gripping documentary feature, ten years in the making, plays out like a political thriller centred on Michel Cojot, a French businessman whose search for answers about his father’s wartime disappearance leads him to South America onto the trail of one of the most notorious Nazi fugitives of the twentieth century, Klaus Barbie — the “Butcher of Lyon.”
What begins as a personal investigation gradually evolves into a tale of vengeance, moral reckoning and, remarkably, a connection to the 1976 Entebbe hostage rescue.
Dvir, an award-winning documentarian with a journalist’s instinct for verification, approaches the material more as a character study wrapped inside a geopolitical thriller than a conventional Holocaust documentary. His focus was not simply whether Cojot could have killed Barbie when he had the chance, but what such a decision would have meant. The result is a film fascinated by the thin line between justice and revenge.
Stylistically, To Kill a Nazi is a dynamic blend of media. Dvir weaves together contemporary interviews, archival photographs, historical documents, news footage and location-based cinematography to create a constantly shifting visual texture: Rather than relying solely on talking heads, the film moves restlessly across decades and continents, using records, testimony and period imagery to reconstruct Cojot’s extraordinary journey.
The documentary’s investigative structure mirrors the protagonist’s own quest, with each new piece of evidence opening another chapter in an increasingly improbable story. The interviews are particularly revealing. Dvir reportedly conducted conversations with more than two dozen participants and experts, including members of the Cojot family, renowned Nazi hunters Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, historians and figures connected to the Entebbe operation. This breadth and variety gives the film both emotional intimacy and historical authority. The narrative continually shifts between the close personal contacts and commentators, such as military historian Saul David, allowing one man’s obsession to illuminate wider questions about memory, justice and survival.
What makes the documentary buzz-worthy is its detached viewpoint. Cojot is emerges neither saint nor vigilante caricature. Dvir presents him as a complicated figure haunted by hesitation, regret and the burden of history. The film’s most powerful achievement is not its revelation of Nazi methods but its exploration of what unresolved grief can compel an ordinary person to do.
Narrated (by Jason Alexander) with a storyteller’s flair and paced with the urgency of a suspense feature, To Kill a Nazi demonstrates how documentary filmmaking can rival the most engrossing narrative cinema. Dvir has taken a little-known historical episode and transformed it into a meditation on courage, conscience and the consequences of a single moment’s decision. By the time the credits roll, viewers may find themselves debating not what happened, but what they would have done in Michel Cojot’s place.
World premiering at Dances With Films on 22 June 2026