Destination Unknown is a passion project 13 years in production, a documentary featuring moving interviews with a dozen Jewish survivors of Nazi persecution. Elderly men and women describe what happened to them and their families during the war. We see them returning to the slave labour and death camps, driving through the countryside and contemplating their former home towns and villages where they were rounded up for deportation.

Their interviews are intercut with family photographs, ciné film and archive footage. Unlike a history programme made for television, there is no voiceover, no maps or graphics and no historians adding context. This is not the past mediated by experts but a direct recording of the painful process of bearing witness by those who were there and who are now nearing the end of their lives. Several of the elderly survivors have died since these interviews were filmed by producer Llion Roberts.

Among the stories of horror and loss, there are tales of individual kindness and bravery by local people who helped them. Eli Zborowski returns to Zarki in Poland and shows us the house where a bricklayer constructed hiding places in his cellar and attic to shelter his Jewish friends; we imagine what it was like to hide there in the dark with no air for hours, sometimes days. There are descriptions of Nazi sadism, particularly vividly recounted by two survivors of the forced labour camp of Płaszów, where the infamous commandant Amon Göth set his dogs on prisoners or shot them simply for amusement. Destination Unknown includes a very rare interview with the late Mietek Pemper, who was Göth’s prisoner-secretary. Pemper helped Oskar Schindler compile the list of Jewish prisoners taken from Płaszów to Schindler's factory, thus saving many of them from deportation to the death camps.Roman Ferber, the youngest survivor on Schindler's list, gives a very vivid account of losing his father and brother. We meet him as a soft-spoken man living in America; he shows us images from the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945. Ferber holds up a famous photograph taken by the Russian liberators in 1945. Prisoners are pressed up against the barbed wire fence; Ferber is the dark-haired boy staring straight at the camera (pictured above, in the centre).

Moments of reflection like these are profoundly moving and it may not be necessary to overburden them with emotive music as the film-makers have chosen to do. Occasionally archive is used as generic illustration without enough on-screen information about its source; this can be problematic when so much film was shot for propaganda reasons and it's risky to use it as verité without clear attribution. Captions may be disliked by film-makers as they clutter the screen and are associated with TV graphics, but while there are Holocaust denialists in action, any ambiguity about source is risky. 

I was a little disappointed in Destination Unknown because the film’s promotional material made the promise: "Their stories do not end with liberation. We see how they had to survive the chaos that came afterwards and their attempts to build new lives." Indeed, there are touching accounts of trying to find relatives and friends in the Displaced Persons camps immediately after the war, descriptions of psychological traumas and reasurring home-movie footage of one happy family in America in the 1950s. But what we do not get is the bigger chaos. The struggle that Holocaust survivors faced after the war is a neglected and deeply shameful tale. Survivors returned to their former homes to be met with locals' enduring anti-semitism and resentment that they wanted to reclaim their property. 

According to the late, great historian David Cesarani in his book Justice Delayed, post-war Britain took in more East European former Waffen-SS members than Jewish survivors of the camps; the UK authorities obstructed survivors' desire to emigrate to British Palestine. Destination Unknown is a sensitive addition to the canon of films that tell the story of the Shoah, but sadly it doesn’t move the story on. Dramas and documentaries about the Holocaust tend to dwell on Nazi atrocities in isolation, rather than confront the uncomfortable story of the world’s indifference to its survivors. It's a tale that needs to be told, especially as it mirrors our attitudes to the current refugee crisis.

• More film reviews on theartsdesk

@saskiabaron

Overleaf: watch the trailer to Destination Unknown

Gražyna Bacewicz: Chamber Music Diana Ambache and friends (Ambache Recordings)

This is an impeccably restored presentation of the 1945 feature-length documentary that was intended to be shown in German cinemas in order to counter any remaining support for Nazism.

You wouldn’t guess it from her name, but Janina Fialkowska isn’t actually Polish. You wouldn’t guess from her Chopin either, which is sensitive and supple, always emotive and deeply idiomatic.

As alternative facts go, few are as grievous as the assertion that the Holocaust didn't happen. That's the claim on which the British historian (I use that word advisedly) David Irving has staked an entire career. Its day in court provides sufficient fuel to power the new film Denial, even when the creative team don't always seem to be giving the charged material their best shot. 

I exempt from that charge a first-rate cast in which a lips-pursed, blazing-eyed Timothy Spall excels yet again, this time playing Irving. And the stakes posed by the narrative are high enough that one is riveted throughout to a story whose outcome is no surprise: Irving famously lost a libel case that he brought in 1996 against the American academic Deborah Lipstadt (Rachel Weisz) and her UK publishers, Penguin Books. Indeed, seeing this film amidst the present climate, I doubt I'm the only one wishing that Tom Wilkinson's indefatigably incisive Richard Rampton QC might be put to work combating several leading politicians in Ms Lipstadt's modern-day America. The film introduces its central sparring couple at a lecture Stateside, where Emory University professor Lipstadt is heckled from the floor while giving a talk for her latest book by the unrepentant gadfly that is Irving, Waving $1000 by way of provocation, Irving proceeeds to deploy both his age and experience – and the fact that he is English – to challenge Lipstadt (and anyone else) to prove that the Nazis did in fact gas Jews at Auschwitz. From there, Irving ramps up his needling to pursue Lipstadt for libel in court, where she is quite rightly astonished to discover that in Britain she will be presumed guilty unless proven otherwise; America's vaunted presumption of innocence is nowhere to be found.

Lipstadt's dismay leads her to that firebrand solicitor Anthony Julius (Andrew Scott, smiling only when totally necessary), whose CV includes handling "the Diana thing" – which David Hare's surprisingly laboured screenplay then goes to some lengths to explain. Julius, in turn, leads Lipstadt on to the barrister, Rampton, who insists on an exhaustive and first-hand tour of Auschwitz (pictured above) that makes for certainly the most visually heart-stopping section of the film. The soundtrack goes silent as Haris Zambarloukos's roaming camera lets the baleful imagery speak for itself. 

Elsewhere, Hare and director Mick Jackson (The Bodyguard) take a largely by-the-book approach, as if perhaps to resist the emotionally incendiary nature of what is on view. The script is full of "you must be" identifiers that seem like the lazy way out, and one feels slightly for Harriet Walter, who is forced to embody the entire community of Holocaust survivors that Lipstadt wants brought before the judge (Alex Jennings, suitably imposing), though her legal counsel argue otherwise. The Anglo-American differences are fairly ham-fistedly dealt with – Lipstadt jogs as incessantly as Rampton drinks fine red wine – and I stifled a laugh at the visual emphasis placed on a particular piece of London statuary which would have been far better left on the cutting room floor. 

Still, Hare has always provided catnip for actors (Weisz led a recent New York revival of his 1978 play Plenty), and they more than rise to the challenge here, Weisz giving it her Sally Field-style gusto-driven best, notwithstanding a Queens accent that might as well exist in inverted commas. The men are all terrific, ranging from British theatre regulars like Elliot Levey and Pip Carter in smallish roles to the trifecta of Scott, Spall, and Wilkinson: the last-named a Mozart-loving paragon of integrity who instructs Lipstadt on the appeal of black pudding (yuk!).  

Indeed, listening to Wilkinson hold forth on the depredations of prejudice and cowardice sends the mind on a mental march, the likes of which all too many men and women at the moment in Washington would do well to take on board. 

• Read more film reviews on theartsdesk
• Overleaf: watch the trailer for Denial

“Existential realism” is a term, contradictory though it might sound, that comes to mind when describing the work of the great Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski. The films he made in the last five years of his life – The Double Life of Veronique (1991) and the Three Colours trilogy – may be his best-known, but the director had already been exploring the same fundamental concerns for a quarter of a century by then.

This is farce played at a bizarre pitch, hysterical and absurd. Its Polish director, Andrzej Zulawski, remains most notorious for Possession, the 1981 horror film about marital immolation in which Isabelle Adjani erupts with a juddering, liquefying, demonic miscarriage in a Paris subway, earning her Best Actress at Cannes and the film a UK ban as a Video Nasty. Zulawski’s final film is more gently reflective at heart, but still uncompromisingly unique.

We’re in Gdańsk for the launch of the I, Culture Orchestra (sounds like an Apple product, someone points out). The new outfit has Sir Neville Marriner as guest conductor, at 87, still on sparkling form. The orchestra has brought together young musicians from across Eastern Europe “to encourage better cultural understanding” between Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Have psychologists analysed whether subtitles increase our enjoyment of TV drama, perhaps lending it an extra tincture of the exotic? They do no harm at all to this new Polish drama about border guards protecting the frontier between Poland and Ukraine. In Referendum week, it's a hot topic (these Polish guards, with an Alsatian tracker dog called Osama, don't favour a Merkel-esque open-door policy to refugees trying to slip through the forest).  

On the face of it, there is nothing in this tightly focused little piece that says anything new about the Holocaust. The plight of a poor Jewish boy unfortunate enough to be growing up in 1930s Poland is dismally familiar. The story of life-affirming music made in the jaws of hell – the starving ghetto, the Nazi work camp – has been amply covered on page and screen. And one’s first thought during the opening 10 minutes of this production is, slightly guiltily: do I really have to look this horror in the face yet again?