‘The Kiev Trial’: Venice Review

Dir/scr: Sergei Loznitsa. Netherlands/Ukraine. 2022. 106mins

Sergei Loznitsa has been raiding the archives again. After presenting Second World War aerial bombing documentary The Natural History Of Destruction at Cannes less than four months ago, the prolific Ukrainian director brings his latest found-footage work to Venice in an out of Competition slot. And it’s an absorbing, timely work, which touches on a question that is fresh in the minds of many of his countrymen today: how best to bear witness to crimes of war, and how to separate revenge from retribution. 

There’s a feeling that the three hours of footage uncovered here has been waiting for three-quarters of a century for someone like Loznitsa to come along and draw out both its historical significance and its contemporary resonance

Based on archive material uncovered by the director during the production of his 2021 documentary Babi Yar. Context, Loznitsa’s latest work gives the audience a front-row seat in what has become known as the ‘Ukrainian Nuremberg’ – a trial of 15 Nazis and their collaborators that took place in Kiev in January 1946.

One of the fascinating aspects of Loznitsa’s film is that it’s a ‘remix’ of material that was shot during the trial by a professional troupe from the Moscow Central Documentary Studio, which then languished in archives in Moscow and Kiev. Despite the formality of the Soviet documentary style of the time, those 1940s camera operators clearly had an interest in the human drama that was unfolding here. They used a resourceful range of fixed angles to frame the court officials, the defendants, those who were called to bear witness, and the members of the audience in the packed courtroom – some straining to catch a glimpse, some watching through opera glasses, all seemingly touched by a sense of occasion. The film reminds us how important such trials can be for the affirmation of a collective identity.

The director and his team restored the original footage and the sound, and Loznitsa – who also gets a ‘writer’ credit – edited it and added title cards. He’s not new to this game, having used a very similar method in The Trial (2018) and State Funeral (2019), but with The Kiev Trial in particular there’s a feeling that the three hours of footage uncovered here has been waiting for three-quarters of a century for someone like Loznitsa to come along and draw out both its historical significance and its contemporary resonance.

Pared-back intertitles inform without comment, telling us simply the names of the court officials, witnesses and defendants, and the atrocities the latter are accused of. Filmed from the side as they take the witness stand, the German officers mostly respond to the questioning of the military tribunal in a matter-of-fact way – an impression that will be reinforced for non-German speakers by the gap between their un-subtitled testimony (when we have time to observe their manner, unencumbered by the knowledge of what the are saying) and the subtitled court interpreter’s translation.

The delay somehow makes these deadpan descriptions of operations where whole villages were wiped out all the more devastating. Twice, separate defendants are asked why they shot children, too. One – and the contemporary echoes are not lost on us – talks about the need to get rid of the local population in order to create ‘lebensraum’ or ‘living space’ for the occupiers. The other says the kids were simply in the way, “all running around the village”.

In his thoughtful edit, Loznitsa applies an incremental approach, saving some of the most heart-stopping testimony – connected with the September 1941 massacre of Jews in the Babi Yar ravine near Kiev – for the film’s last half hour. (Like Babi Yar. Context, The Kiev Trial was produced in conjunction with the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Centre). The Kiev Trial doesn’t end there, but with an execution by hanging in a crowded square in central Kiev. It’s a powerfully uncomfortable and ambivalent conclusion, one that warns us about the dangers of turning payback into public spectacle.