Imaginary feasts explore the most amazing documents: notebooks filled with cooking recipes written by prisoners and deportees in Nazi concentration camps, in the Soviet Gulag and in Japanese war camps. Philosophers, historians, psychoanalysts, neurologists, etc. analyze and try to understand what those extraordinary 'imaginary feasts' written in the heart of the concentration system-meant. 

This eight-part series examines the history of the Shoah from the rise of the Nazi power to the Final Solution and the discovery of the camps and its impact on the post-war world. With the participation of some 50 leading university scholars, it presents the latest findings in historical research while remaining accessible to the widest possible public.

Ce film mène une enquête inédite sur les oeuvres réalisées clandestinement dans les camps nazis. Il dialogue avec les rares artistes déportés encore vivants et avec les conservateurs de leurs oeuvres : des émotions qu’elles suscitent, de leur marginalisation, leur signature ou leur anonymat, de leur style, ainsi que de la représentation de l’horreur et de l’extermination.

Claude Lanzmann filmed Benjamin Murmelstein, the last President of the Jewish Council in the Theresienstadt ghetto, the only “Elder of the Jews” not to have been killed during the war. A rabbi in Vienna in 1938, he fought bitterly with Adolf Eichmann, managing to help around 121,000 Jews leave the country, and preventing the liquidation of the ghetto.

In the summer of 1943, thousands of Jewish refugees in Italian-occupied southern France enjoyed a rare respite from persecution, protected by an unusual force: the occupying Italian Army, who temporarily shielded local and foreign Jews despite pressure from the Germans and the French Vichy administration.