Sergei Loznitsa (Ukraine)

Film:
Babyn Jar. Context

Director:
Sergei Loznitsa (Ukraine)

Running time:
112 minutes

Using material from German, Russian, and Ukrainian archives, the film reconstructs the massacre in which 33,711 Jewish men, women, and children were murdered by a German Sonderkommando and the Ukrainian auxiliary police on September 29 and 30, 1941. The film is in Russian and German with English subtitles and uses archival footage, some of which has never been shown before. Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Nazi Einsatzgruppen murdered Jews in Ukraine and in other areas of Eastern Europe occupied by German forces. On September 29 and 30, 1941, German units murdered 33,771 Jews at Babyn Yar, a ravine on the outskirts of Kyiv. Until November 1943, further mass shootings of Jews, Roma and Soviet prisoners of war took place there. It is estimated that a total of around 100,000 people were killed at the site between 1941 and 1943.- For decades, there was no memorial at Babyn Yar. In the 1950s, the ravine was filled with industrial waste from brick factories. When a monument was finally erected in the 1970s, it did not explicitly mention that Babyn Yar had been a site of the mass murder of Jews.