Babi Yar. Context

Sergei Loznitsa grew up in Kyiv and walked past the Babi Yar ravine on the way home from the swimming pool. He has spent much of his career building films out of archive material — Blockade, The Trial, State Funeral — and this one won the Golden Eye, the documentary prize at Cannes, in 2021.

There is no narration and there are no talking heads. Loznitsa and his team went through Soviet, German and amateur footage of Ukraine between 1941 and 1943, restored it, and built a soundtrack from scratch — every footfall, engine and crowd murmur is a reconstruction, since the material is silent. The result is disorientingly present. German units enter Lviv and Kyiv; local crowds greet them; the city burns; the order posted on walls instructs the Jews of Kyiv to assemble with their documents and valuables. The massacre itself was not filmed. What Loznitsa shows is the before and the after, and the faces of the people standing in the street.

The title is the argument. Babi Yar has usually been narrated as an atrocity committed by an occupying army; Loznitsa's material insists on the surrounding society — the collaboration, the looting of emptied apartments, the post-war Soviet decision to build over the ravine. It is the most rigorous thing he has made, and among the most necessary films about the Holocaust in eastern Europe made this century.