Babi Yar

Synopsis

On September 29th and 30th, 1941 Sonderkommando 4a led by SS-Standartenführer Paul Blobel, assisted by Wehrmacht units and the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police, and without any resistance from the local population, shot dead in the Babi Yar ravine almost the entire remaining Jewish population of the city of Kiev – 33,771 people.

Based on historical facts and documentary evidence, the film reconstructs one of the key moments of contemporary European history and readdresses the question: “How could this happen?” The question, which remains as relevant, as it is irresolvable.

About the Director

Sergei Loznitsa was born on September 5th, 1964. He grew up in Kiev (Ukraine), and in 1987 graduated from the Kiev Polytechnic with a degree in Applied Mathematics. From 1987-1991 Sergei worked as a scientist at the Kiev Institute of Cybernetics, specializing in artificial intelligence research. In 1997, Loznitsa graduated from the Russian State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) in Moscow, where he studied feature filmmaking. Sergei Loznitsa has been making films since 1996, and by now he has directed 25 award-winning documentaries and 4 fiction films. Loznitsa’s feature debut My Joy (2010) premiered in the main competition at the Festival de Cannes, and was followed by the feature film In the Fog (2012), which was awarded FIPRESCI prize at the 65th Festival de Cannes. In 2017, Sergei Loznitsa presented his third feature A Gentle Creature in the competition of the Festival de Cannes. In 2018, Loznitsa received the prize for Best Directing of the Un Certain Regard section of Festival de Cannes for his fourth feature film, Donbass. In 2013, Sergei Loznitsa founded a film production company Atoms & Void. Sergei Loznitsa’s feature-length documentary Madien (2014), which chronicles the Ukrainian revolution, had its world premiere at a Séance Special of Festival de Cannes. His subsequent feature length documentaries, The Event (2015), Austerlitz (2016), The Trial (2018) and State Funeral (2019) were presented at the Special Screenings of the Venice Film Festival. In 2021, Sergei received a Special Jury Prize of the L’Oeil D’Or Award in Cannes for his film Babi Yar.Context. Sergei Loznitsa continues to work on both documentary and fiction projects.

Artistic Statement

And then it emerges in springtime,
A corpse in the vernal flood,
A Son would not know his Mother,
A Grandson, with grief-stricken heart.
Anna Akhmatova

On the 29th and 30th of September 1941 more than 33 000 Jews – mostly women, children and elderly – marched from early morning till late afternoon through the streets of Kiev, carrying their most valuable possessions and supplies of food and warm clothing, only to be robbed, tortured and then murdered by Nazis when they arrived at their final
destination – the Babi Yar ravine at the western outskirts of the city.

The Jews of Kiev were obeying the order, which had been issued by the Nazi authorities the day before, but they were not physically forced to walk. There were no soldiers or policemen escorting them to their Golgotha. Some families were accompanied by their non-Jewish friends
and neighbors, who wanted to walk their loved ones all the way to the gates. There were some among the Jews who believed that they were going to be relocated; and some of them knew for certain that they would be killed. Yet, all of them obeyed the order and walked to Babi Yar… The streets were lined with Kievans, curious to see the spectacle of the Jews leaving the city for good. Some of the onlookers were shouting abuse. Even German officers and soldiers would stop to watch the never-ending stream of Jewish people heading to Babi Yar…

I was born in 1964. I grew up in Kiev, in the Babi Yar neighborhood. I took a trolleybus past that place almost every day. I knew very little of what happened there during the war and I knew nothing about the shooting of the Jews. This subject was not talked about. People were afraid of truth; they did not want to know it. I only heard rumors that some dreadful tragedy took place there during the war, but I did not think much of these “fairy tales”. One more terrifying event happened on the same spot in
March 1961. After the war, the authorities decided to build a stadium on the burial site, in order to wipe out remaining traces of Babi Yar. A dam was built and the ravine was filled with concrete. In 1961 the dam burst, and a powerful stream of muddy pulp covered city streets. Hundreds of people were buried alive under the debris. The authorities tried to hide this horrific incident…

When I began working on the script of “Babi Yar” in the summer of 2012, I had at my disposal a few books and archive records concerning the life of Dina Pronicheva, a woman, who managed to escape from Babi Yar. I imagined that Dina had to become the main heroine of my film. In August
2012 I came to Kiev and met with historians Tatyana Evstafieva, the author of the book Babi Yar: Man, Power, History, and Dmitry Malakov.

The more I talked to the scholars, the more texts I read, the more obvious it became to me, that a film about Babi Yar cannot have a “main hero”. Neither can it have a linear narrative and a singular plot, which will reduce this Biblical story to a tale about “bad Germans” and “desperate victims.”

I was primarily interested in the causes, and not in the consequences of this man-made hell on earth. I wanted to understand the chain of events and the reasons each party had – and there were many parties involved – the Soviet regime, the occupation regime (Wehrmacht and Gestapo), the Soviet security forces (NKVD), the Ukrainian nationalists, the civil population, the Jews – for making such decisions and taking such actions, which, in the end, brought all of them to Babi Yar.

The more facts I learned, the more testimonies I read, the more clearly the questions were formulated in my mind, and the more clearly I saw the pivotal points of the plot. I had to distance myself from the traditional
“retrospective” representation of the story – when historical events are shown in a linear sequence and perceived as direct results of the actions taken by their participants. I wanted to unfold the story as a multitude
of parallel planes – when certain events and certain acts happen almost simultaneously and independently of each other, and yet each of these seemingly unconnected events pre-determines the outcome.

How could this happen that within days after the Germans’ triumphant entry into the Ukrainian capital, ordinary Kievans were supplying the new Nazi authorities with the detailed lists of Jewish residents? How could this
happen that elderly people and women with newborn babies, too old or too weak to walk to Babi Yar, were being denounced and, in some cases, beaten to death by their watchful non-Jewish neighbours? How could this happen that German soldiers and Ukrainian policemen (some having only
recently defected from the Red Army ranks), most of them respectable, law-abiding citizens with high moral convictions and loving families, performed the horrific task of killing fellow human beings with such matter-of fact attitude and businesslike efficiency?

In the Soviet and post-Soviet society, the history of the Second World War was subjected to such gigantic ideological distortions and falsifications, that, in my opinion, the only way to demystify history is to present the facts stripped of any subjective commentary.

My intention is to create an impression of a “documentary” image. After many years of research, I have collected a large body of archive footage, shot in the German occupied Ukraine, starting from June 1941. I intend
to use some of this footage in the film. This year I have made a montage documentary “Babi Yar. Context”, based entirely on this footage, and I’m now convinced that it would be possible to incorporate some of the scenes (for example, the scenes with the Soviet POWs, battle scenes and
the episode of the city of Kiev on fire) into the fabric of the fiction film. I would be happy, if at the end of the screening the spectator has to ask himself – among other things – where and how did the director of the film manage to find such rare archival material… In order to intensify the “documentary” and “archival” qualities of the film, I will rely on the means of editing and sound design. Some episodes of the film will look like scraps of archive footage and will be edited in such a way, as if the editor was short of material – with a staggering rhythm and visual gaps and blackouts. In some episodes the sound would “overflow” into black fields, which will separate the scenes, as if the editor runs out of image while the soundtrack continues to run. The sound of the film will also become a key factor in creating the image of the crowd. In many scenes vox populi – bits of dialogue, sounds of people talking or screaming – will be heard off-screen, not synchronized with the image. I intend to create an impression of the events unfolding hear and now – in front of the spectators’ eyes.

Thus, in the absence of the “main hero”, it is the crowd, which takes his place, and becomes the protagonist of the film. I want to show masses of people in action and experiencing powerful emotions: anticipation, fear, panic, joy, and rage. In certain episodes, a Figure of Death will be seen among the thousands of faces in the crowd…

-Sergei Loznitsa