Watching ‘Shoah’ in Berlin, 80 Years After Auschwitz

On the first Sunday of this year’s Berlin International Film Festival, Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah” (1985) — a nine-and-a-half-hour documentary about the Holocaust — screened to a nearly full house in the auditorium of the city’s Academy of Arts.

Tricia Tuttle, the festival’s new director, spoke before the film, along with a curator from Berlin’s Jewish Museum and Dominique Petithory-Lanzmann, the director’s widow. Tuttle called the screening a “triple remembrance”: This year is the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the 40th anniversary of “Shoah,” and the centenary birthday of Lanzmann himself, who died in 2018.

The mood was reverential. “Shoah” — which consists of interviews with Holocaust survivors, bystanders and perpetrators, as well as footage of the sites referenced by the speakers, such as the Auschwitz and Treblinka death camps — is widely considered one of the greatest documentaries of all time. Its monumental length is key to its power; it suspends viewers in the act of witnessing humanity’s capacity for evil and its astonishing resilience, which we see washed across the subjects’ faces as they tell their stories.

There’s no denying Lanzmann’s achievements or the significance of “Shoah,” yet the festival’s commemorative programming — which also includes the world premiere of “All I Had Was Nothingness,” a documentary by Guillaume Ribot that pays homage to “Shoah” — also plays out amid growing concerns that Germany’s culture of Holocaust remembrance is stifling the free speech of other artists.

Last year, the film festival, known here as the Berlinale, came under fire after filmmakers participating in the event (including the directors of “No Other Land,” a documentary currently nominated for an Oscar) were denounced by German officials and festival executives for making statements in solidarity with Palestinians.