- July 13, 2026
- 3:24 pm
- Ukraine
In the National Historical and Memorial Reserve “Babyn Yar” in Kyiv, the summer program “RESEARCH SPACE” – Ukr. (“RESEARCH SPACE”) has begun — a two-month public project dedicated to personal and family history, collective memory, the Holocaust, and the tragedy of Babyn Yar.
The project officially opened on July 9, 2026, and on July 10, the first event of the film club took place — a screening of the experimental film Holofiction by director Michal Kosakowski.
This film cannot be called an ordinary documentary work or an artistic reconstruction of Holocaust events. Kosakowski created a large-scale film collage from fragments of thousands of feature films and television series shot from 1938 to the present day.
Through screen images already familiar to millions of viewers, the director poses a complex question: how much of the modern understanding of the Holocaust is based on historical documents and testimonies, and how much is shaped by mass culture and cinema.
Holofiction: the story of the Holocaust, assembled from thousands of film fragments
The screening of Holofiction took place on the evening of July 10, 2026 in the open air near the “Living Memory” exhibition center in Babyn Yar. The event was held in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut Ukraine.
The opening of the film club was attended by the director of the Goethe-Institut in Ukraine, Fabian Mültaler. According to the Federation of Jewish Communities of Ukraine, he emphasized that preserving the memory of tragedies like the Holocaust is necessary not only for understanding the past. Historical memory helps society recognize dangerous processes and overcome modern challenges.
The full text of his speech is not published in open access, so these words should be perceived as a summary presented by the event organizers, rather than a verbatim quote.
Holofiction was created as an experimental study of how cinema has depicted the Holocaust over the decades. Michal Kosakowski studied an archive that included more than 3000 artistic works dedicated to World War II, the persecution of Jews, and the mass extermination of people.
From this vast material, the director selected thousands of episodes and edited them into a single sequence. The film features recurring visual motifs:
trains and deportations;
arrival of people at camps;
pogroms and raids;
humiliation and persecution of Jews;
mass graves;
people watching the tragedy from windows or shelters;
images of Nazi criminals;
scenes of resistance, escape, and destruction.
From these fragments, Kosakowski essentially reconstructs the chronology of the Holocaust, but does so exclusively with images already created by other directors.
In Holofiction, there are no dialogues or traditional voice-over explanations. The viewer is left alone with the editing, sound, and music. The film’s duration is 102 minutes.
The director, screenwriter, and editor was Michal Kosakowski. The music was composed by Paolo Marzocchi, and the sound was handled by Andrea Veneri. The film is a joint production of Germany and Austria — by Kosakowski Films and Atelier Uli Aigner.
Dispute with Claude Lanzmann
One of the starting points of the project was the attitude of French director Claude Lanzmann, creator of the famous documentary film “Shoah,” towards the artistic depiction of the Holocaust.
Lanzmann believed that some events cannot and should not be reconstructed through fictional cinema. In his opinion, the attempt to artistically reproduce the mass extermination of people can turn a historical catastrophe into a spectacle.
Kosakowski does not simply repeat this position but engages in a complex indirect dispute with it.
Holofiction shows that, despite Lanzmann’s warnings, thousands of feature films and series about the Holocaust have been created over the decades. Their visual solutions gradually began to repeat, and certain images turned into stable cinematic clichés.
The film invites the viewer to think about where the line is between preserving memory and exploiting tragedy, between historical testimony and artistic cliché.
The official description of the Venice Film Festival emphasizes that the film explores the ethics and responsibility of cinematic storytelling. It shows how repetitive screen images shape collective memory and influence the perception of real history.
This topic is of particular importance now, as there are fewer and fewer direct witnesses of the Holocaust.
Kosakowski himself explained that he wanted to address primarily young viewers who are increasingly distanced from the events of World War II. In his opinion, the disappearance of the generation of witnesses requires finding new ways of transmitting memory, but these ways must take into account the risk of distortion, simplification, and turning tragedy into an element of mass culture.
Holofiction is part of a larger authorial project by Kosakowski called Dark Tourism. It consists of ten multimedia works and explores the culture of memory through cinema, photography, and artistic installations.
Premiere at the Venice Film Festival
The world premiere of Holofiction took place in 2025 at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival.
The film was included in the Venice Classics program, where restored classic films and documentary works about cinema are shown.
The public screening of the film took place on September 1, 2025, at 5:00 PM in the Sala Corinto hall. Another screening was included in the festival program on September 2.
In the official program of the Venice Biennale, Holofiction is listed as a German-Austrian film with a duration of 102 minutes without dialogues.
For the screening in Babyn Yar, a film was chosen that speaks not only about the Holocaust but also about the mechanisms of forming historical memory. This is what connects Holofiction with the overall idea of the “RESEARCH SPACE” project.
NAnews — News of Israel notes that the conversation about ways to preserve memory is especially important for the Jewish audience. The Holocaust remains not only a part of the history of Europe and the Jewish people but also a warning about the consequences of dehumanization, propaganda, anti-Semitism, and public indifference.
Archives, books, testimonies, and cinema: the full program of the project
“RESEARCH SPACE” is not just a series of film screenings.
The project combines four main directions:
Archival Laboratory — lectures and practical classes on information search, working with documents, and digitizing family archives.
Film Club — documentary and experimental films about the Holocaust, historical responsibility, Nazi propaganda, the genocide of the Roma, and the trial of Adolf Eichmann.
Book Club — discussions of studies dedicated to Babyn Yar and the wars of memory.
Testimony Space — working with unique items and documents from the archive of Holocaust history researcher Ilya Levitas.
Organizers invite visitors to bring family photos, letters, and documents. During certain events, materials can be scanned, digitized, and preserved.
Thus, the personal history of each family becomes part of a broader picture of the past.
The project began on July 9 with a lecture by Kirill Vislobokov on searching for information in archives. The main program runs from July 10 to August 30, 2026.
Events in July
July 10, 7:00 PM — Holofiction
Screening of the film by Michal Kosakowski, Germany — Austria, 2025. The event is organized in cooperation with Goethe-Institut Ukraine.
July 18, 3:00 PM — archival laboratory
Lecture by Kirill Vislobokov “Searching for information in the archive. How it works,” as well as a practical session on digitizing and preserving the family archive.
Participants will be able to bring their own documents and photos for scanning.
July 24, 7:00 PM — “The Dead Nation”
Screening of the film by Romanian director Radu Jude, shot in 2016.
The film is based on archival photographs and explores the life of Romanian society in the 1930s-1940s. Behind the seemingly calm photographs of everyday life, the growth of anti-Semitism, the fascization of the state, and the persecution of Romanian Jews gradually unfold.
July 26, 7:00 PM — “Things of people who lived here before 1941”
Researcher Yuri, also known as Amir, Radchenko will present items from the “Testimony Space” and talk about the people who lived in the Babyn Yar area before the mass shootings began.
July 30, 6:00 PM — lecture on the historical and modern context of Babyn Yar
The lecture will be conducted by the architectural office FORMA.
July 31, 6:00 PM — discussion of the book “Bitter War of Memory”
The meeting is dedicated to the work of historian Victoria Khiterer. Anatoly Podolsky, Sofia Gracheva, and Yuri Radchenko will participate in the discussion.
Events in August
August 2, 7:00 PM — Amaro Kino program
A selection of contemporary Roma short films will be presented.
The screening is timed to the International Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Roma Genocide, which is observed on August 2. The date is associated with the extermination of the so-called Roma family camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau by the Nazis on the night of August 2-3, 1944.
August 3, 6:00 PM — stories of the deceased and survivors
Yuri Radchenko will present the stories of people who perished in Babyn Yar and those who managed to survive the Nazi occupation.
August 8, 3:00 PM — digitization of the family archive
Visitors will be able to bring photos, letters, and other family materials for scanning and preservation.
August 9, 3:00 PM — discussion of Pavel Polyan’s book “Babyn Yar”
Anatoly Podolsky, Sofia Gracheva, and Yuri Radchenko will participate in the meeting.
August 16, 7:00 PM — “Riefenstahl”
Screening of the documentary film by German director Andres Fayel, shot in 2024.
The film is dedicated to director Leni Riefenstahl, whose works became part of the visual propaganda of Nazi Germany.
After World War II, Riefenstahl tried to present herself as solely an artist, allegedly distant from politics. The film explores her archives, public statements, and responsibility for creating an attractive screen image of the Nazi regime.
The screening is also held in cooperation with Goethe-Institut Ukraine.
August 22, 3:00 PM — master class on digitizing family materials
Participants will again be able to bring their own documents and photos.
August 23, 3:00 PM — stories of the deceased and survivors
The second meeting of Yuri Radchenko, dedicated to the fates of the victims and witnesses of the Babyn Yar tragedy.
August 30, 7:00 PM — “The Eichmann Trial”
The program concludes with a film by American director Eliot Levitt, created in 2023.
The film is dedicated to the trial of Adolf Eichmann — one of the main organizers of the deportation and extermination of European Jews.
Eichmann was abducted by Israeli intelligence in Argentina in 1960 and brought to Israel. The trial began in Jerusalem in 1961, and the testimonies of Holocaust survivors became one of the most important public testimonies about the crimes of the Nazis.
Ending the program with a film about the Eichmann trial is symbolic: the project begins with the question of how the Holocaust is depicted in artistic cinema and ends with an appeal to real court testimonies and the responsibility of specific organizers of mass murder.
The full schedule is confirmed by the National Historical and Memorial Reserve “Babyn Yar”.
Why this program is important today
The tragedy of Babyn Yar has become one of the largest symbols of the Holocaust on the territory of Ukraine.
On September 29 and 30, 1941, the Nazis shot tens of thousands of Kyiv Jews in Babyn Yar. In the following years, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, underground fighters, psychiatric hospital patients, and other victims of the Nazi regime were killed there.
However, “RESEARCH SPACE” offers to talk not only about the number of victims and the chronology of the crime.
At the center of the project are specific people, family documents, things, photographs, testimonies, and ways of transmitting memory to future generations.
Archival materials allow victims to regain their names and biographies. Cinema shows how society represents the tragedy. Book discussions help understand conflicts around history, and family archives connect public memory with personal experience.
For NAnews — News of Israel, this initiative is also important because it creates a space for direct dialogue between Ukrainian and Jewish memory.
The memory of the Holocaust should not exist only in the form of official ceremonies. It requires constant work with documents, testimonies, language, art, and family history.
This is exactly the approach offered by the program in Babyn Yar: not just to remember the past, but to explore how it is transmitted, what disappears with the generation of witnesses, and what responsibility those who tell about the historical tragedy today bear.
All events are held at the “Living Memory” exhibition center at the address: Kyiv, Yuri Ilyenko Street, 46A.
Entry to the program events is announced as free. For certain events, including the first screening of Holofiction, organizers have provided for pre-registration.
Main sources:
National Historical and Memorial Reserve ‘Babyn Yar’ — official program of the project ‘SPACE OF RESEARCH’.
National Historical and Memorial Reserve ‘Babyn Yar’ — announcement of the Holofiction screening on July 10, 2026.
Venice Biennale — official page of the film Holofiction in the Venice Classics program.
Official schedule of the 82nd Venice International Film Festival.
Federation of Jewish Communities of Ukraine — announcement of the first film screening and participation of the director of Goethe-Institut Ukraine Fabian Mültaler.
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