Holofiction
Rafal Kosakowski developed an identity and designed film titles and promotional material for Michal Kosakowski’s experimental film Holofiction, nominated for Best Documentary on Cinema in the Venice Classics section at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival, where it celebrated its world premiere.
Holofiction explores the visual representation of the Holocaust through a montage of thousands of excerpts from fictional films and television series produced between 1938 and the present. Drawing from an extensive archive of over 3,000 narrative works, the film critically examines how Holocaust imagery has been codified and reproduced in cinema across decades. Holofiction exposes recurring visual motifs and narrative patterns that have become iconic in the portrayal of the Holocaust. Inspired by Claude Lanzmann’s skepticism toward visual representations of historical trauma, the film questions the possibility and implications of depicting such an atrocity in fictional cinema. Through its essayistic approach, Holofiction invites audiences to reflect on the ethics and responsibility of cinematic storytelling, urging a deeper understanding of how these representations shape collective memory and historical perception.
Holofiction is part of Dark Tourism, a research-based artistic project conceived and developed by Michal Kosakowski. Comprising ten thematically interrelated sub-projects, it investigates the visual representation of World War II and the Holocaust in contemporary media and collective memory. Central to the project is a critical examination of the image as a site of meaning production, ideological projection, and cultural negotiation.
