Two Prosecutors (Zwei Staatsanwälte)

 

Director Sergei Loznitsa

director at Cannes with Alexsandr Kuznetsov

Georgy Demidov

TWO PROSECUTORS (Zwei Staatsanwälte)          B+                                                      France  Germany  Netherlands  Latvia  Romania  Lithuania  Ukraine  (118 mi)  2025  d: Sergei Loznitsa

The time has come to look the Soviet monster directly in the eye.  It must be understood in order to be defeated.                                                                                                                              —Director Sergei Loznitsa

Grim, austere, and relentlessly bleak, Loznitsa reminds us what falling into authoritarianism really feels like, as evidenced by the height of Stalin repression in 1937, which is meticulously dissected and explored from the inside, in the jail cells and in the halls of power, exposed with surgical precision, where arrest warrants leading to deaths proceed with miraculous efficiency.  What this Kafkaesque parable suggests is a government’s insistence on the appearance of legality while undermining the entire system by arresting and jailing all dissenting voices, using the prisons as a wave of terror against these individuals, denying them any and all legal rights once they’ve become the exclusive property of a Gulag prison system, never again allowed to see the light of day, as the government runs on complete systematic repression.  Winner of The François Chalais Award (Prix François Chalais) at Cannes in 2025, an award that recognizes the esteemed values of journalism, and the Palić Best Film Award, the top prize at the European Film Festival in Palić, Serbia, the slowly developing story is told in a way that requires extreme patience, as the pace is glacial, allowing plenty of time to ruminate over what we see, with a patient yet unmistakable sense of foreboding, focusing on the devastating minutiae that allows fascism to breed, expressed by the impassive coldness of officers and authorities, as well as the silences of the corridors.  From the maker of My Joy (Schastye moe) (2010), a haunting parable of post-Communist Russia, In the Fog (V Tumane) (2012), a sobering meditation on the complicated moral decisions faced by both soldiers and citizens during wartime, and Babi Yar. Context (2021), which shows how Ukrainians were complicit in the Nazi Babi Yar massacre of Jews, there is probably no director who has documented the criminal history of Russia in such an extensive way as Loznitsa, who has lived in Germany since 2001, yet still prefers to call himself a Russian, objecting to a total boycott on Russian artists and culture, which got him expelled from the Ukrainian Film Academy, where this film, spoken mostly in Russian (viewed as the language of the aggressor), has been banned in both Russia and Ukraine.  The born-in-Belarus yet raised in Ukraine director knows a thing or two about Russia, as his documentary films in particular provide an archival, historical document of the horrors from Russian/Soviet history, where the grounds of the Babi Yar Holocaust Memorial Center was one of the first targeted sites that was hit by Russian missiles and shells during the first days of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine (Russia strikes Babyn Yar Holocaust memorial site in Ukraine).  This film serves as a monument to authoritarianism, where maintaining power and control through abject fear is the paramount concern, where the number of prisoners in Russia rose from about 180,000 in 1930 to more than 5 million by the mid 30’s, where a wave of arrests by the secret police, or the NKVD, the Gestapo-like organization that was responsible for the arrests, tortures, deaths, and massacres of millions of people, with millions more falling victim to forced labor, deportation, famine, mass shootings, and starvation.  It’s important to remember that Time magazine put Stalin on its cover 11 times, named Man of the Year twice in 1939 and 1942, as the world was simply oblivious to the grandiose scale of cover-ups of the mass atrocities.  From July 1937 to mid-November 1938 alone, about 1.5 million people, including most of the leaders of the October 1917 Revolution, were arrested, shot, kidnapped, or detained in Gulag camps, where it may come as no surprise that in today’s Russia, the Stalin era is glorified.  The entire film takes place largely in two locations, a cavernous penal colony, which was actually shot in a hundred-year old Brasa prison in Riga, Latvia that is now closed, and the massive halls of justice in Moscow, where the film title only begins to describe how the legal process, which is supposedly available to everyone, in fact shuts the door, yet maintains, on the surface, an avenue of legality, but the NKVD intervenes and undermines any hint of legality at every turn, reaching an unimaginable level of systematic arrests, humiliation, and torture, which may as well be a blueprint into the present.  

Recalling the banality of evil from Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2023), the source material for the film is a novel by the same name written by Georgy Demidov, a Russian-born Soviet experimental physicist and political prisoner from the Kharkiv Technical Institute in Ukraine who was wrongfully arrested in 1938 and spent 14-years in the brutally harsh conditions of the KOLYMA PRISON CAMP in Siberia, a Gulag he referred to as “Auschwitz without the ovens,” where emaciated and starving prisoners were routinely fed only 400 calories per day.  After he was released, he documented the cruel realities of camp life through short stories and novellas, primarily focusing upon the physical and psychological destruction of scientists, intellectuals, and artists under Soviet rule, a phenomenon known as Eliticide.  In 1980, the KGB raided his home, destroyed his typewriters, without which he could not write, as his fingers had been frozen in the Gulag, and confiscated all his manuscripts, where Demidov died in 1987 believing his life’s work was lost forever.  However, following the collapse of the Soviet Union just a few years later, his daughter recovered his surviving manuscripts from KGB archives, and his collected works were later published in six volumes in Russia.  Unlike other famous camp writers like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or Varlam Shalamov, whom he befriended in prison, Demidov wrote with a sharp focus on individual characters and the Kafkaesque absurdities of state power.  What stands out here is just how chillingly accurate it is, recreated in cold, meticulous detail, getting right into the psychological mindset of the people portrayed and the ruthless system of oppression that erodes every avenue of hope and freedom, continually finding new ways to brutalize their own people, with the Russia of today hurtling back toward Stalinism.  At the center of the picture is a young principled Bolshevik prosecutor, Alexander Kornev (Alexsandr Kuznetsov), only three months removed from law school in the city of Bryansk, some 200 miles southwest of Moscow, yet he’s filled with the revolutionary ideals and beliefs of a true patriot about building a better socialist society, keeping his own personal thoughts to himself, making him hard to read, revealing next to nothing about himself, always remaining calmly measured and restrained.  He becomes a prosecutor at the very moment when the country was in a process of radical change in a way that wasn’t necessarily understood by the rest of the population.  Against all odds, as prisoner letters are routinely burned before ever leaving the heavily guarded premises, but one, written in his own blood on a tiny piece of cardboard, somehow makes it to the desk of this young prosecutor, who is summoned to the local prison by an Old Bolshevik named Stepniak (Alexander Filippenko), like a cry for help, or an answer to his prayers.  Kornev’s ominous arrival to the prison is met by a chorus of silent women standing across the street, mothers, sisters, and daughters of men who are imprisoned inside, waiting for any word, as inmates are strictly forbidden from contacting anyone on the outside.  Built around dialogue gripped by fear, where every spoken word may have devastating consequences, as seemingly harmless encounters can lead to arrests, the staging is minimalist, so precisely constructed and so skillfully staged, essentially built around fewer than ten scenes, mostly unfolding in a series of private conversations, dominated by fixed shots and symmetrical compositions, bare environments, and suffocating silences that speak, disturbingly, of the present.  The goal of expunging all critics and enemies is to consolidate an elite group of loyal supporters whose allegiance lies strictly with Stalin, much like Trump and Putin have similarly targeted political enemies and systematically eliminated all opposition by surrounding themselves with nothing but blindly obedient followers.

Literally half the film is spent waiting with Kornev waiting to pass through the various layers of prison bureaucracy, who have no interest whatsoever in allowing him to see the prisoner, culminating with the Prison Governor (Vytautas Kaniušonis) offering him a litany of excuses, but he persists, waiting for hours, until they finally agree to the meeting, where he has to pass through a labyrinth of locked gates and doors, always accompanied by a hostile group of implacable faces from the warily suspicious assembled guards who are not pleased by his presence.  When we finally meet the feeble, starved, and thoroughly broken-down prisoner, he’s the kind of character we rarely see in films, a historical icon, having been there at the beginning of the Bolshevik Revolution, filled with the promise of building a new and better society, only to fall victim of the tactics of the NKVD, who have spent years torturing him, and other loyal party members like him, into confessing crimes they never committed, where “honest, knowledgeable experts are substituted by ignorant charlatans,” a line that is sure to draw snickers from American audiences, as it’s a pattern recognized so well in the Trump administration.  Stepniak’s body may have endured endless atrocities, where he’s nearing the end from organ failure, yet his mind is still sharp, making him a fascinating subject of interest, with Kornev recalling how he attended one of Stepniak's speeches about truth and Bolshevism at his law school, where he was immediately impacted by the force of his ideas, impressed that he also belonged to the former party leadership in his hometown.  It’s hard not to be intrigued by this man, finding his beliefs and the essential value of his work suddenly deemed anti-revolutionary, making him an enemy of the state.  Yet he actually stands for something, as opposed to Stalin’s secret police who simply want to erase his existence, as that’s what authoritarians do.  There’s a major difference in conceiving ideas and beliefs, literally building something out of nothing, with the hopes of transforming an entire society, and the parallel course of killing and destroying anything that has to do with planting that seed, where murder is the ultimate political weapon.  With a heavy reliance on dialogue, it’s rare for films to so exquisitely expose profound and radical ideas with this degree of simplicity, where nothing is left to the imagination, as we are literally taken inside this hellhole, an example of immersive cinema, with the film designed to plunge viewers into the psychological mindset of the times, seeing the profound effects, where if the guards could have their way, this prosecutor would never again see the light of day, TWO PROSECUTORS - New Sergei Loznitsa movie ... YouTube (1:17).   But Stepniak urges Kornev to visit Stalin, or members of the Politburo, and do whatever it takes to get as close to the highest powers of the land with a message of what goes on inside these prison walls, as it’s a crime against the revolution.  Accordingly, Kornev takes a train to Moscow, but on route his attempts at sleep are interrupted by an extended monologue from the wildly eccentric old man named Pegleg (also played by Alexander Filippenko), who tells tales about losing a leg and an arm fighting for the Soviets in the Battle of Kowel in WWI, one of the fiercest battles in history, and how he met with Lenin personally in Smolny for war disability benefits, touting his generosity, now seeking an audience with Stalin.  Inspired by Captain Kopeikin from the biting critique of mass corruption in Gogol’s novel Dead Souls, this underlines the disenchantment of the Old Leninist Guard, described as “the true believers,” with the direction of the revolution, where half of the Red Army’s entire officer corps was either killed or imprisoned, filling the screen with an omnipresent dread, as it shows how authoritarian systems actually destroy their own ideals, where Stalinism was the antithesis of Bolshevism, something only the Trotskyites truly understood, making them targets as well.

While the first part of the film is a hellish, Dante’s Inferno allegory, where the gates of Hell bear the inscription, “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here,” the second part exudes a Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare, shot inside the marble halls of the old Latvian Radio building in Riga, a Soviet relic constructed in the Stalinist Empire style, the only Latvian public service station to broadcast in Russian.  Swallowed inside the massive interior space, where it’s easy to get lost inside a maze of offices and corridors, with a giant, winding staircase reaching upstairs, Kornev seeks a meeting with the Procurator General, the highest-ranking law officer in the entire country, but is turned away by his secretary (Nerijus Gadliauskas), a man who is fastidious about manners and details, as he has no appointment, but Kornev is persistent, refusing to take no for an answer, so he waits and waits, like the brilliant opening sequence in Orson Welles’ THE TRIAL (1962), Orson Welles- The Trial: Before The Law - Prologue | Franz ... YouTube (2:51), until everyone else has been seen, and only then does the secretary allow him entrance.  Sitting in front of a statue of Stalin, where above that bust hangs a portrait of Lenin, the second prosecutor, Vyshinsky (Anatoliy Beliy) commands immediate attention and respect, never remotely cracking a smile, calm, yet stern, and acutely intelligent, with a sharp ear for details, never missing a thing, where the two prosecutors are intentionally pitted as mirror images of one another, both tasked with rooting out corruption and investigating state crimes.  Knowingly bypassing the local authorities in Bryansk because he knows they’ve been infiltrated by the NKVD, Kornev acts as an ambassador for Stepniak, recounting the egregious conditions there, revealing how the NKVD have rounded up, arrested, and then tortured or killed all the Old Bolsheviks into confessing purely fictional crimes, then using those confessions to issue death warrants, with Vyshinsky shockingly displaying a sympathetic ear, as if hearing these accusations for the first time, Two Prosecutors new clip official from Cannes Film Festival ...  YouTube (55 seconds), indicating he needs medical evidence of the scars of torture if he is to proceed, instructing Kornev to provide that evidence.  Acknowledging that would be paramount to political suicide, as the NKVD would arrest him for crimes against the state, Vyshinsky offers legal protections, starting with evidence they had this face-to-face meeting, guaranteed train passage, along with official documents authorizing him to conduct further investigations.  Kornev leaves hopefully, fully aware of the grave consequences at stake, finding himself sitting in a compartment shared with two jovial men who describe themselves as factory inspector engineers, Vasily (Valentin Novopolskij) and Petya (Dmitrijus Denisiukas), where they toast to Soviet law, with Vasily gleefully singing Shostakovich’s the counterplan song on guitar, which repeats itself over the end credits performed by a full choir, "The Song of the Counter-Plan" [Песня о Встречном] - Soviet ... YouTube (2:45), as it was seen and heard in the 1932 film COUNTERPLAN by Sergei Yutkevich and Fridrikh Ermler.  Whatever inklings viewers may have had up to this point, Kornev becomes the Josef K. of his own story, as the chilling final shot is nothing less than shocking, revealing the true scope of Stalin’s Great Purge, which literally engulfs the entire country in a shroud of death.  Clearly as much about Putin’s Russia as Stalin’s, it should be noted that all three of these Russian actors, Aleksandr Kuznetsov, Alexander Filippenko, and Anatoli Beliy, left Russia after Russian troops invaded Ukraine in February 2022, where their performances offer a testimony of political resistance.  Impeccably shot by Oleg Mutu, typically associated with Romanian director Cristian Mungiu and his Palme d’Or winning 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (4 luni, 3 saptamâni si 2 zile) (2007), but also Beyond the Hills (După dealuri) (2012), so detailed and precise, with no camera movement whatsoever, only static shots that intensify the creeping paranoia and full-blown claustrophobia, a world where colors are almost non-existent, this is a full-blown horror story that we’re not likely to forget.   

Babi Yar. Context

 

Dina Pronicheva

Director Sergei Loznitsa

Babi Yar. Context                   B                                                                                           Ukraine  Netherlands  (121 mi)  2021  d: Sergei Loznitsa

In Ukraine there are no Jews. Nowhere - not in Poltava, Kharkov, Kremenchug, Borispol, not in Iagotin.  You will not see the black, tear-filled eyes of a little girl, you will not hear the sorrowful drawling voice of an old woman, you will not glimpse the swarthy face of a hungry child in a single city or a single one of hundreds of thousands of shtetls [small towns].

Stillness. Silence. A people has been murdered.

Murdered are elderly artisans, well-known masters of trades: tailors, hatmakers, shoemakers, tinsmiths, jewellers, housepainters, furriers, bookbinders; murdered are workers: porters, mechanics, electricians, carpenters, furnace workers, locksmiths; murdered are wagon drivers, tractor drivers, chauffeurs, cabinet makers; murdered are millers, bakers, pastry chefs, cooks; murdered are doctors, therapists, dentists, surgeons, gynecologists; murdered are experts in bacte-riology and biochemistry, directors of university clinics, teachers of history, algebra, trigonometry; murdered are lecturers, department assistants, candidates and doctors of science; murdered are engineers, metallurgists, bridge builders, architects, ship builders; murdered are pavers, agronomists, field-crop growers, land surveyors; murdered are accountants, bookkeepers, store merchants, suppliers, managers, secretaries, night guards; murdered are teachers, dressmakers; murdered are grandmothers who could mend stockings and bake delicious bread, who could cook chicken soup and make strudel with walnuts and apples; and murdered are grandmothers who didn’t know how to do anything except love their children and grandchildren; murdered are women who were faithful to their husbands, and murdered are frivolous women; murdered are beautiful  young women, serious students and happy schoolgirls; murdered are girls who were unattractive and foolish; murdered are hunchbacks; murdered are singers; murdered are blind people; murdered are deaf and mute people; murdered are violinists and pianists; murdered are three- year-old and two-year-old children; murdered are eighty- year-old elders who had cataracts in their dimmed eyes, cold transparent fingers and quiet, rustling voices like parchment; murdered are crying newborns who were greedily sucking at their mothers’ breasts until their final moments. All are murdered, many hundreds of thousands, millions of people.

This is not the death of armed people during the war… This is the murder of a people…of a people’s soul and body. An entire people murdered.

—Ukraine without Jews, by Vasily Grossman, 1943, (PDF) Vasily Grossman - Ukraine without Jews (excerpt)

A unique exploration of history, where the director combines the public and private archives in Russia, Germany, and Ukraine, working with the Russian State Archive of Film and Photo documents in Krasnogorsk (RGAKFD), with the Bundesarchiv in Berlin, with several regional archives in Germany, with the Ukrainian State Archive in Kiev and with private archives, including footage from soldiers on the front lines, reels from Die Deutsche Wochenschau, the Nazi propaganda news bulletin that was produced in Germany and distributed throughout the territory occupied by the Third Reich, as well as the help of the Babi Yar Holocaust Memorial Center, the aim of this documentary is to “plunge the viewer into the atmosphere of the time.”  Yet the origins feel more personal, as Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa grew up in Kiev and went to school there, not far from the Babi Yar ravine, but had no knowledge of what happened there, declaring “Even though I grew up close to Babyn Yar and to the old Jewish cemetery, which was completely destroyed, and as a child I stumbled across the Jewish tombstones many times during my walks, my parents were very reluctant to answer my questions on the subject.”  We now know that on September 29–30, 1941, in a large ravine in Kiev known as Babi Yar, the Nazis slaughtered more Jews in two days than in any other single German massacre, killing 33,771 Jews.  In total, from September 29, 1941, until October 1943, the Nazi forces, with no interference from local residents, killed nearly 100,000 people at Babi Yar.  Nazi authorities banned photo and film cameras from the places of mass executions, however through the use of archival footage, it is possible to reconstruct the surrounding circumstances of what happened.  With the troubling rise of xenophobic far-right groups in Europe, the unlearned lessons of history and the growing seeds of hate and resentment make this time we’re living in dangerous and extremely precarious times.  For instance, less known even to practiced historians is that fact that as many as 500,000 to a million former Soviet citizens were living in Ukraine and actually joined the Third Reich in fighting against the Red Army, as they were hoping the Germans would deliver them from Stalin.  With that in mind, the assembled footage is presented with no narration or talking heads, instead there is frequent use of introductory intertitles that place each historical setting in context, opening with “June 1941. Soviet Ukraine” as bomb blasts are dropped on the city of Lviv, the largest of the westernmost cities of the Ukraine, demolishing a bridge while targeting supply dumps and airfields, as Nazi troops are seen riding in diesel-powered Panzer tanks, rumbling motorcycles, and even horse-drawn vehicles as they move their artillery units in and begin to occupy the town, where a mass square is filled with POW soldiers, the first attack in Operation Barbarossa, a German plan to destroy the Soviet Union.  The city is surrounded by plumes of smoke, while dead bodies are strewn everywhere.  The Soviets left behind murdered prisoners, as corpses lay on the ground swarmed by flies, with bystanders, including many children, stopping to stare, yet Jews are blamed with collaborating with the enemy, ordered to line up by the prison and carry out the bodies, with Nazi soldiers going house to house setting them ablaze, with some seen in the foreground drinking in a celebratory mode, exacly as depicted in Elem Klimov’s Come and See (Idi i smotri) (1985), while citizens are seen bringing flowers to the tanks, openly welcoming them while destroying the posters of Stalin, replacing them with posters of “Hitler, the Liberator,” as children are seen fighting for hand-sized Swastika flags on sticks.    

Using only found and restored archival footage, mostly black and white, the film images were restored by Jonas Zagorskas, a colorist and VFX artist, who colorized some of the images, with Vladimir Golovnitski adding an innovative sound design, adding aural effects and even dubbing voices to what is otherwise silent footage.  Throughout, people inevitably stare at the camera as they walk by, as there are endless scenes of troop movements lugging heavy equipment across muddy terrain, including lines of captured POW Soviet troops walking along in single file, yet there are also lines and lines of soldiers marching, so massive that one wonders where they all sleep, as there couldn’t possibly be adequate accommodations for either group.  Even for prisoners, where could you possibly hold them all?  As it turns out, what we see is unfathomable, a giant expanse of people packed together like sardines for as far as the eye can see, where the number of Red Army POW’s was actually 600,000, most dying of starvation as the Nazis never made provisions to feed them.  A small number of about 10,000 were released if a family member came present and they signed a document swearing to never fight against Germany again, as the films shows scenes of recently freed Ukrainian POW’s being processed, greeted briefly by their smiling wives who take them home.  Yet it’s scenes not normally seen that stand out, like women trying the clean the bodies of the dead with branches and brooms, or hideous footage of people being pulled from their homes and beaten with sticks, stripped naked and paraded through the streets by their neighbors, some dragged by their hair, long lines of trenches are dug, mostly by women, apparently to bury the dead.  By the time the Nazis get to Kiev, there are more explosions, as several days after the Germans took control of the city remote-controlled explosives were detonated by the Soviets, who mined the central streets and planted the bombs, causing mass destruction and many civilian casualties, as buildings burned for days, leaving 25,000 people homeless, drawing the ire of the Nazis who again accused Jews of collaborating with the enemy, posting an ominous public order in Russian, Ukrainian, and German language:  

All Yids of the city of Kiev and its vicinity must appear on Monday, 29 September, by 8 o’clock in the morning at the corner of Mel’nikova and Dokterivskaya streets (near the Jewish Viis’kove cemetery).  Bring documents, money and valuables, and also warm clothing, linen, etc.  Any Yids who do not follow this order and are found elsewhere will be shot.  Any civilians who enter the dwellings left by Yids and appropriate the things in them will be shot.

Expecting 5 or 6,000, nearly 34,000 reported under the false belief they would be resettled, and were taken to the Babi Yar ravine on the outskirts of town where one by one they were systematically stripped, giving up their luggage, then their coats, shoes, clothing and underwear, leaving their valuables in a designated place, before being led into the ravine in groups of ten where they were gunned down by SS police battalions and units of the Ukrainian auxiliary police, who actually walked among the corpses shooting anyone still breathing.  According to testimony afterwards, they were made to lie down on top of Jews who had already been shot, with bodies placed atop bodies, covering them with a layer of dirt at the end of the night before commencing again the next day.  According to some reports, many were still alive after the shootings, but were in a state of shock, where as many as 10% may have died from suffocation under all the other dead bodies.  As there is no existing footage, still shots are shown of half-buried bodies, discarded coats and a pile of boots and shoes, and a prosthetic leg left behind while an extensive passage of Vasily Grossman’s eloquent memorium Ukraine without Jews is read, (PDF) Vasily Grossman - Ukraine without Jews.  While there may have been some who risked their lives by helping the Jews, thousands of others remained indifferent to their fate, becoming preoccupied with dividing the remaining Jewish property amongst themselves.  What’s truly appalling is the widespread infestation of anti-Semitism, as neighbors reported on their neighbors, acted as informants, and provided lists of residents to the Nazis.  Even after the massacre, a few remaining invalids and elderly Jews who were too frail to walk to Babi Yar were hunted down by the local residents, dragged out of their homes and stoned to death.  Incredibly the locals did this on their own initiative, without any German involvement.  Afterwards local newspapers celebrated, printing the bold headline “Kiev is liberated from oriental barbarians, finally a new life begins,” while the following month they held a big parade, a chillingly indifferent response to the extermination of tens of thousands of people, as life, for all practical purposes, went on as normal.  Despite centuries of Ukrainians and Jews living peacefully together, the extermination of Jews in Lubny, Poltava, Kharkov, Kremchug, Borispol and Lugotin among others, continued shortly afterwards with no public interference.  There is some question about Ukrainian complicity, as Ukrainian nationalists at the time were looking for an independent state protected by the German army, unaware that the Germans planned to kill them as well, but the Nazi priority was to exterminate all the Jews first, Poles and Ukrainians would come afterwards.

The war on the Eastern Front began to take a turn in 1943 when Soviet troops reclaimed Kiev, with Hitler posters once again replaced by Stalin, though by this time the war-weary citizens were too overwhelmed by the exhaustion of war to present flowers to the returning Red Army soldiers, instead they were met with a tired resignation, yet a massive public celebration was held in the town square to promote a united Poland, Ukraine, and Russia behind the Soviet banner.  International journalists, including Americans, traveled to the site of the Babi Yar massacre where details of the atrocity were presented, including an attempted cover-up, as Nazis forced Russian war prisoners to dig up the bodies and burn them in an attempt to conceal the evidence, building two-storied funeral pyres, cremating 1500 bodies with each operation, taking nearly 3 days to burn completely, a process that went on for 40 days.  Afterwards the Nazis turned on those prisoners, spraying them with machine gunfire, yet a dozen out of more than 200 managed to escape.  Actual court testimony is presented in the war crimes tribunals that followed the war, including one woman witness Osmachko who escaped execution in Kharkov by lying in a pile of corpses for eight long hours without moving while the massacre continued all around her, even as soldiers walked around the pit with machine guns searching to shoot anyone showing signs of life, yet none was more riveting than Dina Pronicheva, Testimony of Dina Pronicheva about the Annihilation of the Jews in Babi Yar on September 29-30, 1941, a Soviet Jewish actress from the Kiev Puppet Theatre, who tore up her identity card and claimed she was not Jewish, that she was only there to accompany someone else to the site, but Nazis ordered her death anyway, wanting to eliminate all witnesses, marching her to the ravine, stripping her naked, then as she was about to be shot she jumped onto the pile of corpses and played dead, remaining completely still as the shooting continued all day, with bodies falling all around her, finally covered by a layer of dirt, when she became more afraid of being buried alive than being shot, so she climbed her way out of the massive pit of corpses and a layer of earth, up the side of the ravine and crawled to safety under cover of darkness.  She is among 29 known survivors of Babi Yar, and related her story to Soviet author Anatoly Kuznetsov whose novel Babi Yar was published in 1966, where hardcover copies have been out of print for decades.  Additional court testimony was provided by one of the Nazi sharpshooters, SS Officer Hans Isenmann, whose testimony is brutal, exposing the methodical nonchalance in revealing just how mechanical the entire process is to organize a massacre, expressing no emotion, simply repeating established procedures, exhibiting no regard for human life.  After hearing various testimonies, the director provides rare and macabre footage of the public execution by hanging of 13 Nazi officers in Kiev’s Kalinin Square for “atrocities against the Soviet people,” among them Hans Isenmann.  The square is completely packed by a massive outpouring of 200,000 people completely filling the screen, with Jeeps pulling them into their designated spaces with nooses placed around their necks, and then the Jeeps move away, leaving them dangling in the breeze.  It’s a horrific sight any way you want to look at it, primitive and grotesque, as if that barbaric act can actually eradicate evil from our midst.  About 1.4 million Jews were murdered just in the Ukraine alone, so the execution of a handful of men hardly suffices, but wartime is an entirely different mindset, where this massive extermination of Jews is unprecedented in human history. 

Stalin discouraged placing any emphasis on the Jewish aspect of the Babi Yar tragedy and instead presented these atrocities as crimes committed against the Soviet people, so under the Soviet occupation there was no mention of Jewish genocide at Babi Yar.  Even more astonishing, in 1952 the city council voted to turn the Babi Yar ravine into a reservoir for liquid industrial waste from a nearby brick factory, erecting box-like multistoried apartment buildings nearby, with workers seen wearing no protective covering, standing knee-deep in the industrial waste, and can be seen spreading the waters into the ravine.  The film ends without revealing that after years of filling the ravine with sewage and waste, it eventually ruptured and flooded the city, killing over a thousand people.  Also not mentioned, several attempts were made to erect a memorial commemorating the fate of the Jewish victims, but all attempts were overruled until after Stalin died and was finally denounced by the Party in 1961, when Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko wrote a poem after visiting the site, searching for a sign, a tombstone, some kind of historical marker, but found nothing, so his poem begins with the line, “No monument stands over Babi Yar,” Babi Yar By Yevgeni Yevtushenko - The Holocaust History, a line repeated in Shostakovich’s commemorative 13th Symphony entitled Babi Yar, Shostakovich - Symphony n°13 - Moscow PO / Kondrashin 1962 YouTube (56:35), which is structured around the narrative of the poem.  An official memorial to Soviet citizens shot at Babi Yar was erected in 1976, but it wasn’t until after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 that the Ukrainian government finally allowed a separate memorial specifically identifying the Jewish victims.  It took until the 75th anniversary before a broad international coalition gathered to announce the 5-year plan to construct the Babi Yar Holocaust Memorial Center in Kiev, which proposes to build a $100 million complex of museums, research centers, works of art, and open-air audio and visual exhibits on more than 320 acres of land.  Yet for all the publicity surrounding the event, there is still ample evidence of anti-Semitism in Ukraine, as anti-Semitic literature is regularly sold on Independence Square in Kiev, the symbolic center of the Orange Revolution, while a pro-Nazi group handed out anti-Semitic fliers at the Babi Yar event, and even Swastika graffiti could be seen entering the walkway to the Jewish Babi Yar memorial, as the filled-in ravine is now a park surrounded by urban sprawl.  Loznitsa attended the Russian State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK, the celebrated Russian film school) at the same time as Ilya Khrzhanovskiy, the director of the epic and ever evolving DAU (2019) series of films and art installations about life in the Soviet Union.  Khrzhanovskiy is an associate producer of the film, also one of the people that urged Loznitsa to make this film, while also serving as the artistic director of the Babi Yar Holocaust Memorial Center.  While this is a unique understanding of history, it’s also difficult viewing, with the director relying upon intertitles much more than usual, which still leaves viewers on their own, swamped with historical content, often unaware of just what it is we’re seeing, as the mixed archival content often changes and confuses the narrative.  For instance, multiple early sequences show massive lines of soldiers, yet it’s hard to tell who they are, which side they are on, or whether they are advancing or retreating, a sequence of Ukrainian women digging a ditch is unclear if they are being forced to do this, or why, also in the trial testimony they edited war crimes at Babi Yar with atrocities occurring in other areas, which was not immediately apparent.  Overall this can feel a bit overwhelming.  It’s a bit ironic that the word context is in the title, as without any explanation, context is often precisely what’s missing, despite elaborate measures to assemble footage in a comprehensible fashion.  Much in the same vein as Romanian Radu Jude’s I Don't Care if We Go Down in History as Barbarians (Îmi este indiferent daca în istorie vom intra ca barbari) (2018), these filmmakers are holding their own countrymen accountable for what happened during the war, yet they’re viewed as elitists among the intelligentsia, as the majority of the modern era populace would prefer to overlook the incriminating details, opening the door for more far-right nationalists to push hate speech among their xenophobic rhetoric, as neo-Nazi organizations are now considered commonplace.  While this film is like an anguishing cry in the dark, one has to wonder whether anyone is listening.