Using clips from more than 3,000 feature films and TV dramas, Holofiction weaves an intricate web of recurring images, motifs, and narrative patterns. Trains, faces, acts of violence—what has been inscribed into our collective memory over decades is made visible here, while simultaneously being questioned.
The film takes an essayistic approach and engages in a critical dialogue with the history of its own images—between iconisation and cliché, memory and reproduction. Inspired by the scepticism of SHOAH director Claude Lanzmann toward the representability of the Shoah, Holofiction explores the possibilities and limits of fictional storytelling. The result is a work that is as striking as it is deliberately detached, engaging with the images through analysis rather than emotion—and in doing so, opening a space for reflection on the responsibility of images and the construction of historical memory.
Text: Arkadij Khaet