Sergei Loznitsa’s BABI YAR. CONTEXT

More than 80 years ago, in September 1941, the Nazis massacred 33,771 Jewish men, women, and children over a 2-day period, their naked bodies falling into a ravine located in present-day Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital. Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa is famed for his brilliant archival collage-movies, among them BLOCKADE (the German siege of Leningrad) and STATE FUNERAL (Stalin’s funereal extravaganza), both of which premiered at Film Forum. Here he explains the inexplicable, one of the most heinous war crimes, by documenting those events that led up to it and those that followed — much of the footage shot by amateur photographers among the occupying German soldiers. Loznitsa begins with Ukrainian civilians exulting in the Nazi occupation: attached to a trolley car, a sign reads, “Hitler The Liberator.” Like all of his movies, and perhaps like all major historical moments, BABI YAR. CONTEXT juxtaposes the remarkable with the banal to astonishing effect. BABI YAR. CONTEXT premiered at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival where it won the Special Jury Prize, the L’Oeil d’Or for Best Documentary.