A core paradox of the memorialisation of the Holocaust is that its universal significance also makes it susceptible to being exploited for political ends. The political debates and considerations that have surrounded UNIHRD since its inception reflect a long history of political ‘framing’ of the Holocaust, that began even before the gates of the camps were sprung open. Ever since, public remembering has been fraught territory in any country that has attempted it.

It's hard to calculate what knowledge would we lose in Aotearoa, in Australia, in the UK, if we busy ourselves with predictions instead of focusing on the fact that each victim has a name, a face, a story. After the World Wars, it took historians decades to realise that we needed to recover and tell the anonymous stories of those who lived and died in wartime, too long reduced to numbers of casualties or little arrows on a map. We have no such excuse now. The world’s collective memory is at stake: protect it, record it, cherish it while we still have a chance.

This film is more than an irreverent satire of Nazism. Forget the imaginary Hitler for a second. Waititi’s film is a song to critical thinking. Not quite an ode – too pompous. Not quite a hymn – way too serious. Something unassuming but with a heartbeat, that sways us to dance to our freedom amid the melancholia for the things we’ve lost and the things we’ll never know.

On 22 February 1944, Levi was deported to Auschwitz, where he would survive until the Soviet liberation of the Camp on 27 January 1945. A warm and humble man, he resented any suggestion that his experience was somehow paradigmatic, or that he held some greater clarity than other survivors. Yet Levi’s post-war writings remain fundamental reading, especially his 1947 Auschwitz memoir If This Is a Man. Through his own story, that work still now conveys with an empathetic yet clinical eye the historical, social and economic prerogatives that define the Holocaust as a modern genocide.

In 1974, when Lanzmann had started filming his 350 hours of interviews, Holocaust cinema was the domain of European filmmakers such as Liliana Cavani, Louis Malle, Lina Wetmuller and Joseph Losey, pondering amnesia, conformism, class, and deep Freudian studies of the effects of totalitarianism on the psyche.