43° TORINO FILM FESTIVAL
DOCUMENTARIES COMPETITION
JE N'AVAIS QUE LE NÉANT - "SHOAH" PAR LANZMANN
by Guillaume Ribot
Country: France
Year: 2024
Duration: 95'
Claude Lanzmann spent 12 years creating Shoah (1985), a groundbreaking film that redefined Holocaust representation. 40 years later, filmmaker Guillaume Ribot explores 220 hours of unreleased footage. Lanzmann’s quest to capture the reality of the Holocaust led him to interview victims, witnesses, and perpetrators from all over the world. Overcoming doubt, setbacks, and false leads, he embarked on an unparalleled journey culminating in a landmark masterpiece, now part of UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register. Only using Lanzmann’s own words and never-before-seen excerpts, Guillaume Ribot pays homage to one of cinema’s masterpieces and to its director’s relentless pursuit to tell the untold.
Biography
film director
Guillaume Ribot
(Francia, 1971) is a director, screenwriter and photographer. After studying photography and art history, he devoted himself to press photography. His work as a reporter and on the Holocaust has been published in the national and international press (Time Magazine, Paris-Match, Marianne, Le Monde, The New York Times). At the same time, he has developed a body of work as an author, which has given rise to numerous exhibitions and books, including Les fusillades massives des Juifs en Ukraine, 1941-1944. La Shoah par balles. Since 2014, he has devoted himself exclusively to his work as a director and screenwriter, with a strong penchant for history and archival images.
FILMOGRAFIA
Le Cahier de Susi (doc, 2013), Treblinka, je suis le dernier Juif (doc, 2016), Vie et destin du livre noir (doc, 2019), La Case du siècle (1 ep, serie tv, 2020), Moissons Sanglantes (doc, 2023), Je n’avais que le néant - Shoah par Lanzmann (doc, 2025).
Declaration
film director
“When I discovered these rushes, I came face to face with an incredible material. It felt as if I had unique access to the making of a major film and was able to view what we never see – the accidents, the side issues. I discovered poignant scenes that do not appear in the final cut of Shoah, such as when Claude Lanzmann interviews two survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and one of them, Yitzhak Zuckerman, aka Antek, tells him: ‘Claude, if you could lick my heart, it would poison you.’ Lanzmann, profoundly affected, rests his head on Antek’s solid chest, who welcomes himd and kindly soothes him in a very long sequence-shot. It is this particular sequence that made me want to make this film.”
Cast
& Credits
DIRECTOR: Guillaume Ribot. FILM EDITING: Svetlana Vaynblat. SOUND: Vincent Arnardi, Jean-Pierre Halbwachs, Valérie Arlaud. PRODUCTION: Estelle Fialon, Dominique Lanzmann for Les Films du Poisson, Les Films Aleph.
CONTACT: MK2 intlsales@mk2.com
