The Kiev Trial (КИЕВСКИЙ ПРОЦЕСС). 2022. Netherlands/Ukraine. Written and directed by Sergei Loznitsa. DCP courtesy Atoms & Void. In Ukranian, Russian, German; English subtitles. 106 min.
Produced by the Baba Yar Holocaust Memorial Center, Sergei Loztnitsa’s The Kiev Trial reconstructs, through previously unseen archival footage, Case No. 1679, the so-called “Kyiv Nuremberg,” the postwar hearings during which 15 Nazis and their collaborators were tried and found guilty of atrocities committed on Ukrainian soil, including the murder of some 3,000 children of mixed ancestry; the execution in mass pits of thousands of Jews from Lvov, Rivne, Kremenchuk, and Novomoskovsk; the assassination of suspected communist partisans; and the liquidation of entire villages “under the Fuhrer’s orders…to create lebensraum [living space] for us.” The unembellished courtroom testimonials of the defendants, corroborated by the witnesses to their crimes, including survivors of Babi Yar and Auschwitz, are a profile in “ordinary” human savagery: murder by lynching, beatings, machine gun, starvation, live burial, fire. The reactions of the masses gathered in Kyiv’s Kalinin Square to witness their death by hanging on January 29, 1946, suggest an uneasy catharsis.