To suggest an absence is to imply a presence. Philosophers, novelists, dictators, politicians – as well as almost every “ism” you can think of – take the stage in this absorbing, precisely and elegantly written study of various kinds of atheism. All assumptions are up for grabs, everything brought out into the light and questioned.

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.

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@saskiabaron

Overleaf: watch the trailer to Destination Unknown

How do you tell a story as complex as the eugenics movement, which is pursued afresh in writer-director Stephen Unwin's new play All Our Children? Its idealistic origins lie in Britain with Francis Galton in 1883, before leading to forced sterilisation of the disabled in several countries, starting in America in the 1920s and continung in Sweden into the 1970s; its legacy is today’s screening for conditions such as Down Syndrome.

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.

The Armenian genocide by the Ottomans during and after World War One killed 1.5 million people and is a wound that won’t heal for Armenians, though modern-day Turkey continues to insist that no genocide occurred.

On 23 February 1942 at half past four in the afternoon in a secluded Brazilian hilltown called Petrópolis about an hour from Rio, a maid and her husband pushed at the bedroom door of a modest rented house. Despite the late hour, the tenants had not yet stirred. The door swung open to reveal, lying on the bed, a young woman in a cotton dress rolled over on her side, an older supine man wearing a jaunty moustache and a punctilious tie. The woman’s body was still warm.

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. 

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• Overleaf: watch the trailer for Denial

There will surely be no end to the debate as to how any work of art can approach treating the Holocaust, and its depiction in cinema, with the great immediacy of that form, has always been especially problematic. Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos’s 1965 film The Shop on the High Street (Obchod na korze) certainly stands in the very first rank of such attempts, its depiction of how a civilian population becomes complicit in treatment of outsiders remaining as insightful and necessary today as ever.

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?  

In the world of the concentration camp, clothes or the lack of them sealed your fate.