Audrey Azoulay, Élisabeth Badinter, Jérôme Clément, CorinnaCoulmas, Xavier Darcos, Luc Dardenne, Antoine Gallimard, AgnèsJaoui, Beate Klarsfeld, Serge Klarsfeld, Haïm Korsia, Bernard-HenriLévy, Rithy Panh, Gilles Pécout, Éric de Rothschild, MarjaneSatrapi, Dominique Schnapper, Didier Sicard, Arthur Teboul, SergeToubiana, Wim Wenders
Claude Lanzmann had dreamt of living to be at least a hundred years old, or even several hundred, like Adam or the first men of theBible; after the death of his only son Felix at the age of 23 from cancer, he gave up; that was seven years ago, on 5 July 2018. On 27 November 2025, Claude Lanzmann would have celebrated his hundredth birthday. Although he was unable to live to see that day, he knew that his work and his vital energy would out live him, through the triptych of burning contemporary issues – Why Israel, Shoah and Tsahal – and all his other films, as well as his numerous writings, including his memoirs, The Patagonian Hare. This legacy, which he entrusted to us, will be passed down from generation to generation.
Since the universal significance of Shoah was recognised byits inclusion in UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in 2023, and since France Mémoire highlighted the French character of the workand its author by including Claude Lanzmann’s centenary in its calendar of national commemorations, our aim is to disseminate ClaudeLanzmann’s work as widely as possible, both in France and around the world, thanks to this national and international institutional support. This dissemination will target younger generations in schools through extracts from Shoah and the accompanying educational booklet, already available in France via Lumni Enseignement, and subsequently worldwide through UNESCO’s networks. It will also take place at festivals, in cinemas and on television…
Guillaume Ribot, the director of Bloody Harvests and Lifeand Fate of the Black Book, has poured all his talent and soul into creating this tour de force, which was described at the Berlinale as a thriller or a road movie: a gripping and defiantly categorisable film that recounts the making of Shoah using the 220 hours of Shoah footage and Claude Lanzmann’s memoir The Patagonian Hare (Gallimard 2009): in short, 100 per cent Claude Lanzmann, patiently and magnificently crafted by Guillaume Ribot tooffer us 92 extraordinary minutes. It is also a portrait of a genius filmmaker – a very handsome man in his fifties, intelligent, courageous, hard-working and resilient. Guillaume Ribot portrays him in the manner of those directors who seek to highlight the beauty oftheir leading lady, and this was undoubtedly the approach taken by Claude Lanzmann’s cinematographers: Dominique Chapuis, WilliamLubtchansky and Jimmy Glasberg.
The key events marking the centenary took place at the Institut de France on Monday 24 November 2025, at UNESCO on Tuesday 25, at the Jewish Museum in Berlin and the French Embassy on Thursday 27, at the Sophie Scholl Gymnasium in Berlin on Friday 28, and at the Shoah Memorial on Sunday 30, Tuesday 1 December and Wednesday 10 December. Guillaume Ribot’s film Je n’avais que le néant - Shoah by Lanzmann was released on 19 November on Arte.tv in various European countries. Countless celebrations are taking place around the worldover the course of a year, in partnership with the French Institutes, UNESCO and mk2; the programme schedule is constantly being updated.
