Seventy years after the Babi Yar massacres in kyiv in 1941-1942 – which left 100,000 dead, including 60,000 Jews – the writer Jonathan Littell (The benevolent ones, Goncourt Prize 2006) and photographer Antoine d’Agata met in 2021 in this district on the outskirts of kyiv for a report. “Survey, inventory, photograph, describe. Day after day, season after season. Sometimes alone, sometimes together. » The visits to the field by collaborators, caught up in the war, bring back a disturbing echo between the massacres of Babi Yar and Boutcha. Taking History to witness, that which is made or undone, in An inconvenient place, Littell probes the mystery of violence. How can you write or photograph when there is nothing left to see? So, from a morgue to a ruined building, the duo shows us the buried traces and memories, the “gray, spectral, hidden memory”, the still incandescent presence of the atrocities committed as much by the Nazis as by the forces Russian occupation. A dive into the horror of war.
To watch on video