‘Nobody would forgive me if I told the truth’: new film about pacifist turned Nazi collaborator divides France

In Les Rayons et les Ombres, Jean Dujardin plays a real-life press baron partying during the horrors of the second world war. Director Xavier Giannoli discusses bringing this still sensitive topic to light Xavier Giannoli’s new film Les Rayons et les Ombres (Rays and Shadows) is told from the postwar perspective of Corinne Luchaire, a French actor who was once hailed as “the new Garbo” but grew too close to the Nazis during the German occupation years. As Luchaire records her thoughts on a borrowed tape recorder, she struggles to reconcile her unfaltering devotion to her father, the once-powerful press baron Jean, with his 1946 execution for treason. Her wilful blindness collapses as the Jewish director who helped launch her career visits her cramped flat. When Corinne, played by newcomer Nastya Golubeva Carax, enquires after his sister, he reveals that she died in a concentration camp. “I didn’t know,” murmurs Corinne, only to be met with the devastating reply: “Did you even try to ...

‘It will always be less hellish than the reality’: why cinema keeps returning to the Holocaust

Three new films attempt to address the Holocaust. But can cinema ever hope to adequately confront humanity’s darkest chapter?

Cinema has a troubled relationship with the Holocaust. It is repeatedly drawn to the subject, which seems to offer a shortcut to moral gravity, emotional depth and the highest possible stakes – elements every storyteller yearns for – and yet there is so much that can go wrong.

For one thing, the very act of depicting the horror of the Nazi murder of 6 million Jews risks minimising it. To pick one crude example, no matter how extreme a diet an actor might undertake, they can never resemble the Muselmänner, the walking skeletons who populated the death camps. Whatever can be shown on screen will always be less hellish than the reality.

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