In the Small Hall today director Sergei Loznitsa, of Belarus origin, introduced the documentary he made last year entitled The Trial, which portrays the terror of the Stalin show trials that took place in the 1930s. The film is comprised exclusively of period archive footage: unique, among other things, because it includes sound recordings. For this reason also, Loznitsa's documentary all the more authentically points out the totalitarian mechanisms and manipulative force of demagogy.
The fabricated Stalin show trials paved the way for the Great Terror. The court proceedings against members of the so-called Industrial Party, prominent Russian economists and engineers accused of planning a coup d’état, were staged on camera as a spectacle designed to intimidate. The footage from the trial was used in the Soviet Union to make a 50-minute propagandistic film. Loznitsa, who has already made four archive documentaries, added that today all film footage is available to the public in the national Russian archive: "As for other major Moscow trials, there is also fragmentary footage from the trials of Mensheviks and Nikolai Bukharin."
According to the director's information, the trial was completely fabricated, the charges and the confessions were false, but the sentences were real and their aim was to intimidate and set innocent people against each other. "Stalin also tested in advance which trials to conduct so as to find the perfect tool with which to terrorise and a way to charge innocent people. Even mock trials were conducted," added Loznitsa, who screened a documentary about Donbass in the Ukraine at last year's festival. The film was also screened several times in Russia. "We played it five times in Moscow and the cinemas were always full, sometimes containing up to 1,500 viewers," the director specified.
