VENICE: Watching the powerful historical testament to the horrors of war and the depths of human cruelty in “The Kiev Trial” at the Venice Film Festival, it can seem that little has changed.

The out-of-competition documentary by Ukranian director Sergei Loznitsa uses archival footage of a now-forgotten war crimes trial of 15 Germans held in Kyiv in 1946.

But the atrocities that witnesses recount in the black-and-white film has echoes of war crimes that Ukraine accuses Russia of having committed on its soil in recent months.

The International Criminal Cou­rt is currently investigating war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in Ukraine.

“History repeats itself when we do not learn from history. When we don’t study and don’t want to know,” warned Loznitsa, speaking to journalists on Sunday.

This year, when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began in February, “we all realised we were (back) 80 years ago,” he said.

“We just started to repeat the same things. And it means we did not learn after the war.” The trial was held in January 1946, just as the Allies’ groundbreaking Nuremberg Trials against Nazi war criminals were beginning Stalin sought to use the trials in Kyiv for his own propaganda purposes, Loznitsa said.

The Ukranian director relied on about three hours of footage shot by the Soviets to document the trial, including the arraignment, witness testimony, defence statements and verdict — and finally, the public hanging of the 15 defendants.

The atrocities occurred on different dates and in different places throughout Ukraine, including Babyn Yar, where nearly 34,000 Jews were shot to death in massive pits.

Babyn Yar was the subject of a documentary by Loznitsa last year that played at the Cannes Film Festival in May.

Buried alive

In “The Kiev Trial,”, witnesses describe the countless horrors inflicted on the local population by the Germans — children shot in their mothers’ arms, the elderly ordered to lie down in pits and shot by drunken firing squads, old men set upon by dogs, people thrown down a mine shaft, patients in a psychiatric hospital shot, and more.

The prosecutor asks one defendant why he felt it necessary to shoot the children in a town that his troops were razing to the ground. “Because they were all running around the village,” he replies.

A woman testifies how she played dead after the mass shooting at Babyn Yar.

Published in Dawn, September 5th, 2022