07/09/2022 - VENICE 2022: Filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa presents a haunting glimpse of a post-war Nazi trial

A year after his moving documentary Babi Yar. Context [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Sergei Loznitsa
film profile], Ukrainian documentary filmmaker Sergei Loznitzsa revisits some of the footage he unearthed and expands it into the equally daunting The Kiev Trial [+see also:
trailer
interview: Sergei Loznitsa
film profile]. Known in his home country as the “Ukrainian Nuremberg”, it was the post-war trial of 15 Nazis and their collaborators, taking place in the city of the same name in January 1946. Premiering at the 79^th Venice International Film Festival, in the Out of Competition section, the movie is a moral examination of the grey areas involved in the need for retribution and the “show effect” of war trials.

Starting off amidst the snowy, white landscape of Kyiv in January, bombed ruins, emerging through the snow like teeth pointing at the sky, set the mood for the impending trial. The footage, filmed by a professional team from the Moscow Central Documentary Studio, seems to convey the fact that the Soviet people did their best to hang on while reinforcing the destructive nature of the German occupation. After all, the 15 men and the many witnesses introduced during the trial can only testify to memories, and maybe the numbers of casualties. But it is those with which the movie builds its horrifying momentum. The almost casual tone and the sheer escalating number of victims mentioned evoke an eerie feeling.

Focusing on the unmoved faces of the German soldiers as well as the seemingly haunted expressions of the witnesses, there is no denying that the footage was meant to serve a unifying purpose, forming a collective Soviet identity. Loznitsa, who assembled and edited the three hours of footage into roughly one-and-a-half hours, builds up these stories of war crimes, starting with rather “simple” arrests and monetary fines, then increasing the emotional crescendo to encompass entire villages and ethnic groups being wiped out, all the way up to another recollection of the 1941 massacre of Jews in the Babi Yar ravine close to Kyiv, which claimed up to 33,000 lives.

Loznitsa offers his viewers some narrative orientation by inserting title cards that state the name of the perpetrator or witness, and the crime committed. Jonas Zagorskas’ masterful restoration of the footage allows him to clearly hear the matter-of-fact way in which the German officers recount the events. There is frustration as these men employ the bureaucratic approach of downplaying their role in these happenings, answering, like many after them at subsequent trials, “I don’t know”, “I wasn’t there” or “I didn’t give the order”.

The crimes also extend beyond the persecution of the Jewish population, showcasing the mass murder of the Ukrainian and Russian people, all in the name of creating Lebensraum, or living space – or, as in one case of women and children who were shot, “they were simply running around the village”. Those who survived were left with nothing: the scorched-earth policy demanded that everything be burned to the ground.

But Loznitsa also turns his gaze in the other direction. His documentary doesn’t end with the obvious sentencing to death of the Nazi criminals, but their actual hanging in a crowded square in Kyiv on 29 January 1946. There is a funfair-like atmosphere, as the crowds gather eager for a spectacle, celebrating as the lifeless bodies keep on dangling. Loznitsa is not asking for any compassion. Rather, he shows how easily justice can be turned into spectacular revenge – a debate that modern-day Ukraine will have to face sooner or later as well, given the geopolitical circumstances.

The Kiev Trial was produced by Atoms & Void (Netherlands) and the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center (Ukraine).