17/02/2025 - BERLINALE 2025: Between investigative film and exceptional transmission of memory, Guillaume Ribot signs a captivating making-of documentary about Claude Lanzmann’s major work

“Making this film was a long and difficult battle (...) My knowledge was zero, I had absolutely no idea how to proceed.” By diving into the 220 hours of rushes of the monument Shoah (1985) by Claude Lanzmann and by letting the filmmaker (who died in 2018) speak directly through readings of his book Le Lièvre de Patagonie (2009), French documentarian Guillaume Ribot was embarking on a very delicate operation, given how the radical power of the original work could have revealed itself to be crushing.

But All I Had Was Nothingness, unveiled at the 75th Berlinale in the Berlinale Special section, manages to position itself in a very just place, at once modest (this isn’t about remaking Shoah, but about showing how that film was made) and totally respectful of its implacable background topic (“the radicality of death”), all while participating, in its roundabout way, in the construction of memory, in the act of transmitting. By bringing the shooting of Shoah back to life, the film illuminates not only an exceptional cinematic adventure, but also makes one relive History in the present by lifting the veil on the epic journey of the filmmaker who was looking for “eyes that had seen” the unthinkable.

It’s at the heart of a real investigative film that Guillaume Ribot takes us, from 1973 onwards, in the footsteps of Claude Lanzmann who at that time is starting to meet survivors from the concentration camps (“I understood almost nothing of what they were telling me, they were bits and pieces fragmented by terror”). From continent to continent, from New York to Poland (Treblinka, Sobibór, Chełmno), the trips follow one another and the years pass: identifying his subject (“death itself, not survival”) and identifying his Rosetta stone, finding (in order to make incarnate) the truth of the ultimate witnesses to death in the gas chambers (the Jewish Sonderkommandos), the killers (criminals and bureaucrats) and the villagers who witnessed these dramatic events up close. This is tireless work of, at once, investigative journalism and midwifery for buried words, of which Ribot reveals the hidden facets, Lanzmann’s tricks that get refined (fake passports and hidden camera to confront the executioners and “learn to cheat the cheaters”), his doubts (“what is our message?”), his financial problems, his missteps (“my vigilance was dulling”), his mise en scène (the locomotive driver - rented out for a lot of money - with his 60 imaginary wagons) and his philosophical questions.

Beyond the exclusive footage from Shoah that he brings to the audience’s attention, Ribot signs above all a remarkable making-of documentary that perfectly knows how to adapt to its subject, that of the cinematic quest of a director trying to abolish the distance between past and present, “haunted by all these people” and eager to “resuscitate or kill them a second time so that they won’t die alone”. A wonderful homage anchored in a captivating film that can be both a supplement or an introduction to the major and eternal work that Shoah is and forever will be.

All I Had Was Nothingness was produced by Les Films du Poisson and Les Films Aleph. mk2 Films is handling international sales.

(Translated from French)