Signed by Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa, “Babi Yar. Context” is an archival film that looks back on the massacre of Jews in kyiv during the Second World War.
In September 1941, the Nazis rounded up the Jewish population of kyiv. In two days, 33,000 people will be executed in a place of sad memory, the ravine of Babi Yar. It is on this emblematic episode – of what historians will later call the “Shoah by bullets” – that Sergei Loznitsa returns.
Babi Yar. context is an archival film released this week in theaters in France. Devoid of commentary, it puts end to end the images shot from the winter of 1942 by the Wehrmacht and those of the Red Army triumphantly entering kyiv a year later. Propaganda images therefore, from both sides, since the Soviets will deny the anti-Semitic nature of the massacre, and fill the ravine, amidst general indifference.
This effect of symmetry is heavy with meaning, denouncing in equal parts Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s USSR. They are terrible images, such as this group of men and women waiting at the edge of the ravine, worried and yet unaware of the fate that awaits them. Or these corpses lying in the mud, in 1943. But they also invite us to grasp the history of Ukraine in its complexity, even if it is at the cost of a terrifying darkness.
► Also to listen to the report: Ukraine: 70 years of the Babi Yar massacre (rfi, 4/10/2011)