Boaz Dvir on ‘To Kill a Nazi’ A Decade Chasing One Man’s Impossible Story at Dances With Films LA
Director Boaz Dvir on To Kill a Nazi, the Dances With Films LA 2026 world premiere tracing Michel Cojot’s pursuit of Klaus Barbie and his role in the Entebbe hostage rescue.
Some documentaries announce their scope in the first ten minutes. To Kill a Nazi does something harder: it starts small — a Parisian banker, a stack of old family papers, a name he wasn’t looking for — and only gradually reveals that it’s telling one of the strangest, most consequential true stories most audiences have never heard. Director Boaz Dvir spent more than a decade building it, and the film made its world premiere at Dances With Films LA 2026, with Dvir sitting down at the Kookaburra Lounge with FilmsGoneWild editor-in-chief John Wildman to talk through how you research, structure, and animate a story this improbable without losing the audience’s trust.
The premise alone would carry most films. In 1974, Michel Cojot — a Parisian banker with a wife, three young children, and by all appearances a settled, comfortable life — discovers something in his family’s papers that changes everything: his father was deported by Gestapo commander Klaus Barbie to Auschwitz, where he was murdered. Barbie’s own signature is on the arrest papers. Cojot learns that Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyon,” escaped justice entirely — living under CIA protection in Bolivia, working for the Bolivian government under an assumed identity.
What Cojot does next is the film’s real subject, and it’s more harrowing than a straightforward hunt-and-confront narrative. Posing as a journalist, he travels to La Paz, gains access to Barbie, and eventually finds himself in a rain-soaked alley with the man responsible for his father’s death directly in front of him — pistol drawn, finger on the trigger, an open shot at his back. He doesn’t take it. That hesitation, that single unresolved moment of mercy or failure or something in between, is the axis the entire film turns on, and it’s a far more complicated ending than “justice served” or “chance wasted.” Dvir isn’t interested in resolving that ambiguity for the audience, and that restraint is central to how he talks about the project.
From La Paz to Entebbe
Here’s the detail that turns this from a strong Holocaust documentary into something genuinely singular: Cojot’s story doesn’t end in that Bolivian alley. Months later, he and his twelve-year-old son Olivier were among the hostages held during the hijacking that led to Operation Entebbe — the 1976 Israeli raid that remains one of the most audacious hostage-rescue operations in modern history. Cojot wasn’t a bystander to that operation; his composure and intelligence gathering as a hostage played a real role in what made the rescue possible. A man who couldn’t bring himself to kill a Nazi in cold blood, months later, found himself instrumental in saving dozens of lives in one of the 20th century’s most famous rescue missions. Dvir’s own framing of Cojot’s arc — a life given two improbable shots at rewriting history within the same year — is the emotional spine of the conversation with Wildman.
Why Animation, Not Reenactment
A significant portion of the interview covers a specific craft decision: using animation rather than live-action reenactment to depict scenes with no surviving footage, most critically the La Paz confrontation itself. This isn’t a budget workaround dressed up as an artistic choice — it’s a deliberate strategy to keep the audience aware they’re watching an interpretation of an unwitnessed moment, rather than tricking them into experiencing a polished dramatization as if it were documented fact. Dvir talks through why that distinction matters to him, and why the discomfort of animated, deliberately imperfect recreation serves the material better than a slicker alternative would.
A Decade of Primary-Source Verification
Dvir is candid about the sheer volume of research behind the film — over a decade spent tracking down archives, family documents, and primary sources for a story so improbable that, told as fiction, it would strain credulity. His stated standard for what makes it into the film is exacting: no single piece of information goes in unless it’s corroborated by multiple independent primary sources. For a story built on decades-old testimony, faded arrest papers, and a moment in an alley that only one man witnessed from the inside, that rigor isn’t a technical footnote — it’s the entire reason the film earns the trust it asks for.
The Box in the Closet
One of the more striking beats in the conversation involves a literal discovery — a box, found in a closet, containing Michel’s passport and other physical fragments of the story Dvir was piecing together. Details like this are where documentary filmmaking gets genuinely unglamorous: the difference between a story that stays family lore and one that becomes a verifiable film often comes down to whether the right object turns up in the right closet.
The Filmmaker’s Responsibility to the Family
Dvir also speaks to something documentarians rarely address directly: the weight of representing real people, including family members who are still alive to see how their history gets told. The conversation touches on showing the rough cut to Cojot’s family in Paris — a moment that’s as much a test of the film’s integrity as any festival premiere, because this is the audience with the most at stake in getting it right.
To Kill a Nazi, narrated by Jason Alexander, is produced by Dvir alongside Matthew Einstein and Gayle Zachmann of the University of Florida. Its Dances With Films LA 2026 premiere marks the arrival of a film more than ten years in the making — one that resists easy resolution by design, because the man at its center never fully resolved it himself.
Watch the full interview for the complete conversation with Boaz Dvir.
FAQ
Q: What is To Kill a Nazi, the documentary that premiered at Dances With Films LA 2026?
A: To Kill a Nazi is a documentary directed by Boaz Dvir, narrated by Jason Alexander, telling the true story of Michel Cojot’s discovery of Gestapo commander Klaus Barbie’s role in his father’s murder at Auschwitz, and Cojot’s subsequent pursuit of Barbie in Bolivia. It had its world premiere at Dances With Films LA 2026.
Q: What is Michel Cojot’s connection to the Entebbe hostage rescue?
A: Months after confronting Klaus Barbie in Bolivia, Michel Cojot and his young son Olivier were among the hostages held during the 1976 hijacking that led to Operation Entebbe. Cojot played a meaningful role in the intelligence that helped make the rescue possible.
Q: Why does To Kill a Nazi use animation instead of reenactments?
A: Director Boaz Dvir chose animation for scenes with no surviving footage, including Cojot’s confrontation with Barbie in Bolivia, as a deliberate way to signal to audiences that they’re watching an interpretation of an unwitnessed event rather than a dramatized reconstruction presented as fact.