W. – What Remains of the Lie

Are we too quick to believe the stories of victims? Are we naïve in identifying with them, especially defenseless children? These are the highly topical questions raised by director Rolando Colla in his film about the scandal surrounding the autobiography of Bruno Wilkomirski. In his book, which was highly acclaimed at the time of its publication in 1995, Wilkomirski described his childhood in a concentration camp. Memories of a life that have since been exposed as fiction. 20 years after the revelation, the documentary film takes up the case again and confronts Wilkomirski. Using interviews and archive material, it explores the motives of a man who, as an orphan in Switzerland, inflated his personal trauma into the collective Jewish trauma, thus becoming a perpetrator himself. (Zurich Film Festival)