by Lianna Albrizio for Winter Film Festival
See the feature documentary Memory for Burial (La Mémoire Pour Sépulture)on February 21 @8:45PM at REGAL Union Square (850 Broadway) as part of New York City’s 14th Annual Winter Film Festival. Tickets now on sale!
French filmmakers Charlotte Jarrix and Maud Guillaumin keep one of the oldest Holocaust survivor’s story alive through the grit of candid interviews and the grace of theater.
As the world marked Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27, French film director Charlotte Jarrix chronicled Benjamin Orenstein’s “journey through hell” at his first concentration camp in Poland in 1940 as told by the Holocaust survivor himself. Alternating between interviews from 2020 and a play she staged called “These Words for Burial” fives years before for the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the camps, her newest project, “Memory for Burial” aims to serve as a “living, passed-on voice.” This makes the witness’s words heard both as historical account and as embodied speech, Charlotte said.
Charlotte met the late Benjamin Orenstein nearly two decades ago in Poland, when he was accompanying a group to Auschwitz–Birkenau. As friendship kindled between him and her grandmother, Charlotte felt like a granddaughter to Benjamin: a bond sealed with a promise to carry on the work of remembrance after he was gone. His gift of gab made him the perfect subject of a documentary to do just that.
“Benjamin was not only a survivor,” Charlotte told Winter Film Festival. “In the Lyon area, he became a major transmitter of memory, speaking in middle schools, high schools and universities, and accompanying student groups to Auschwitz–Birkenau.”
Eva Schloss, a Holocaust survivor and the stepsister of Anne Frank, passed away this year on Jan. 3. This aging demographic of living Holocaust survivors was the catalyst behind the urgency to create a piece of revered history for next generations, Charlotte said. In many ways, she said she finds many parallels between the Holocaust and current events.
“Today, narratives are still attacked, instrumentalized, relativized; the film says we cannot let that slope take hold,” she said. “The recent death of Eva Schloss is a reminder that this vigilance must become a collective responsibility, because soon there will be no direct witnesses left to answer in person.”
“Memory for Burial” was Benjamin’s last major interview before his death nearly five years ago. Benjamin was the sole survivor in his family, having traversed seven camps over the span of five years. He rebuilt his life before choosing public speech as a “form of struggle.”
“He said he could no longer stay silent when people claimed there had been ‘no genocide.’ ‘Then where are my people?’ That sentence, in a way, justifies the film: to block a doubt that is deliberately planted.”
Chillingly, “Memory for Burial” resonates with a powerful phrase used in a Le Monde portrait: “His memories are his only burial.”
“For many of the dead, sometimes all that remains is memory as a place of mourning and truth,” said Charlotte. “And Benjamin’s entire family was decimated during the Second World War; he never knew where the bodies of his loved ones lay. Symbolically, memory becomes a grave.”
While many riveting documentaries honor the Holocaust, Charlotte says her quest to carry the torch of Benjamin’s plight makes “Memory for Burial” is a treasure trove for the next generation of “witnesses to the witnesses,” in Benjamin’s words.
“Its singularity lies in its context,” said Charlotte. “It is the story of a man who, after settling in Lyon in 1951, turned to public testimony after the Barbie trial and his confrontation with Holocaust denial,” she said. “Transmission here is not abstract; it answers a direct attack on truth. It is also the handing over of that transmission: He entrusts me with this mission as he reaches the twilight of his life. Where his voice ends, mine takes over.”
About Winter Film Festival
Winter Film Festival is an all-volunteer women and minority-run organization as part of Winter Film Awards Inc, a 501(c)3 organization founded in 2011 to celebrate emerging talent in local and international filmmaking.
The 14th Annual Winter Film Festival runs February 18-22 2026 includes a diverse mixture of animated films, documentaries, comedies, romances, dramas, horror films, music videos and web series of all lengths. Our five-day event is jam-packed with screenings and Q&A sessions at NYC’s REGAL Union Square, six Education sessions/workshops and a variety of filmmaker networking events all coming to a glittering close on February 22 with our red-carpet gala Awards Ceremony.
Winter Film Festival programs are supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. Promotional support provided by the NYC Mayor’s Office of Media & Entertainment.
For more information about Winter Film Festival, visit WinterFilmFest.org
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