Atlanta Jewish Film Festival – All I Had Was Nothingness

This absorbing behind-the-scenes study of filmmaker Claude Lanzmann’s twelve-year effort to create Shoah—his landmark nine-hour cinematic reckoning with the Holocaust—reveals the staggering demands of a project meant to confront an unfathomable past. Over 220 hours of discarded interviews, outtakes, travel encounters, unseen 16mm footage, and private reflections, yield a fuller picture of the personal, ethical, logistical, and financial strain behind the monumental work. Uncertain trust with survivors and reluctant witnesses, and a global search for perpetrators, expose a creator piecing together evidence while wrestling with near-crippling self-doubt. What ultimately emerges is a landmark cinematic methodology that recasts how film engages with trauma, memory, and moral responsibility.