Video Librarian sat down with the director Sergei Loznitsa to discuss his new documentary, Babi Yar. Context, about the events that led to the 1941 massacre of the Jewish population of Kyiv. The educational documentary is recommended for history majors focusing on World War II and the Holocaust. It was presented at the London Film Festival. It is an important film about a forgotten tragic massacre.
I want to start this interview by asking you about the research process of finding footage. How did this project start?
I had worked on this topic since 2012 when I decided to make a feature film about this tragic event. In 2013, I worked on a script, but I just studied the topic and worked with historians before that. We started researching, trying to find as much material as possible. For a long time, we could not finance this film. I would have liked to make a feature film properly. A feature film would have been about episodes of this story, and I shot this documentary in the same way. In 2020, we were about to start the feature film, and Covid-19 happened.
At the same time, a friend of mine, Ilyad Rejonousky, was invited to the Babi Yar memorial at the Holocaust center, and he called me and proposed to me to do something together. At that moment, I had already found a lot of archival footage. They proposed to me to do continuous research. I didn't know if other footage existed; I only knew how the film should have been done and that I had to finish it. It took me another year of work.
How did you manage the financing and assemble the team?
The memorial center financed the whole film. I worked with different researchers in Germany and Russia, and I did research myself. We already did some films together—I made a film about other historical episodes involving Russia and, at that time, we already worked in the same way. I edited myself and worked with two professional editors because I needed support while working on another project.
How long did the whole process take from when you finished the research to when you finished the film?
I researched while I was doing the editing. In the beginning, my idea was to make an exhibition. It would be an exhibition, so I tried to find footage to make episodes. These episodes would be 2-5 minutes. I finished one episode and found additional material, and I ended up having ten episodes not included in the film. It was a non-stop process. We looked at archive work slowly; it was a long process. We had to wait a few months to get access to some archives. I found incredible footage in archives in Russia, and I just finished editing another Kyiv Trail film. It's a three and half hours film, and many historians did not know the content of this footage. In Ukraine, they also have an open archive where they have important resources.
Regarding Babi Yar, how was it for you to tell the story?
First of all, the story of this tragedy was hidden in Soviet times. German special troops killed 3 million Jews in old territories occupied by German armies. Less than 20,000 remained, which means that this nation was completely exterminated. All their memories, their culture, were canceled, even cemeteries. Until 1991, for 50 years, it was forbidden to tell the story. Otherwise, the Soviet authorities would label you as a Zionist. Imagine how painful it was for these people.
In the 1960s and 1970s, in Europe, people started writing books about these topics, but it's a Western point of view of history. The Holocaust started in the Soviet Union. German authorities came to that point in history because people agreed somehow—it is very important to highlight these aspects.
The use of color struck me. At the beginning and at the end of the movie, you use footage that is not black-and-white. Was it a creative choice?
It was a casual choice; I did not want to change anything in the footage. We just cleaned, stabilized, and made it look perfect. The rest is just the story itself.