The Trial
Another View 2019 / Process / Netherlands 2018
Stalin’s show trials paved the way for the Great Terror. The court proceedings against members of the so-called Industrial Party were staged on camera as a spectacle designed to intimidate. Thanks to Sergei Loznitsa, even ninety years on the archive footage still speaks of the unchanging principles of totalitarian mechanisms and of the manipulative force of demagogy and film.
Synopsis
In 1930 the USSR witnessed the beginnings of what would become the Stalin show trials. Top-ranking economists and engineers are accused of plotting a coup d’état. Unusual for the time, the court proceedings are recorded on camera, thus giving rise to one of the first Soviet sound films. Yet these aren’t documentaries, as it might appear, but fictional accounts. The charges are fabricated and the confessions are false, but the sentences are real, their aim to intimidate innocent people and incite them against each other. Loznitsa makes use of archive footage to create an explicitly topical image of terror, in which victims and murderers act with equal fearlessness. His sophisticated conception provides a vivid picture of a historical moment and the devastating cyclicity of social moods.
Kamila Dolotina
About the film
128 min / Black & white, DCP
Director Sergei Loznitsa
/ Screenplay Sergei Loznitsa
/ Editor Danielius Kokanauskis
/ Producer Maria Choustova, Sergei Loznitsa
/ Production Atoms & Void
/ Coproduction Wild at Art
/ Sales ATOMS & VOID
About the director
Sergei Loznitsa (b. 1964, Baranovichi, Byelorussian SSR). Selected filmography: The Train Stop (Polustanok, 2000, doc.), Factory (Fabrika, 2004, doc.), Revue (Predstavlenie, 2008, doc.), My Joy (Schastye moyo, 2010), In the Fog (V tumane, 2012), Maidan (2014, doc.), Austerlitz (2016, doc.), A Gentle Creature (Krotkaya, 2017), Victory Day (Den’ Pobedy, 2018, doc.), Donbass (2018), The Trial (2018)
Contacts
ATOMS & VOID
Brugsestraat, 20, 2587 XS, Hague
Netherlands
Phone: +31 611 006 099
E-mail: contact@atomsvoid.com
Guests
Maria Choustova
Producer
Sergei Loznitsa
Film Director
