The Kiev Trial

The latest film in Sergei Loznitsa’s archival investigation of Soviet and European history is a follow-up to 2021’s Babi Yar. Context, which traced the sequence of events leading up to the notorious massacre of Jews by the German army in Ukraine in 1941. The film collates footage of the January 1946 hearings in which members of the German army were prosecuted for their role in atrocities in Ukraine both at the Babi Yar ravine itself and elsewhere in the country.
This time, there is no on-screen commentary, except that employed to identify the people on screen, while subtitles are used only to translate questions and answers in Russian: when there is spoken German, a non-German-speaking audience is left in the position of the Soviet courtroom audience, waiting to understand what is being said. The very different deliveries of the German defendants and the Russian legal officials represent two distinct, ideologically charged modes of discourse brought face to face – while the testimonies of Ukrainian and Russian witnesses, as well as some victims and survivors of the crimes prosecuted, speak another, more direct language, testifying to an immediate, barely narratable experience of historical truth. (Jonathan Romney)

Sergei Loznitsa: LANDSCAPE (2003), FABRIKA (2004), BLOKADA (2005), ARTEL (2006), PREDSTAVLENIE (2008), MY JOY (2010), O MILAGRE DE SANTO ANTONIO (2012), THE FOG (2012), LETTER (2013), MAIDAN (2014), PONTS DE SARAJEVO (2014), THE OLD JEWISH CEMETERY (2015), SOBYTIE (2015), AUSTERLITZ (2016), A GENTLE CREATURE (2017), DONBASS (2018), VICTORY DAY (2018), STATE FUNERAL (2019), CELLES QUI CHANTENT (2020)