Sergei Loznitsa’s Short Films: Program 1
40 minutes
Before the Second World War, an estimated 40,000 Jews lived in Riga, the capital of independent Latvia. Representing slightly more than 10 percent of the city’s population, the vibrant Jewish community made outsize contributions to its cultural, political, mercantile, and religious life. The Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union and its occupation of Riga in July 1941 put an end to all that. According to the Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Over three days in November and December 1941 alone, at least 25,000 Jews from the Riga ghetto were shot in the Rumbula Forest. By the city’s liberation in 1944, almost all of the Jews in Riga had been killed.” Sergei Loznitsa’s contemporary film is a meditation on historical amnesia and memorialization. The filmmaker observes ordinary Latvians enjoying a day in the park on the outskirts of the city, seemingly oblivious to its origins in 1725 as the foundation of Riga’s first Jewish cemetery (Jews were not permitted to bury their dead within the city limits), and then, some 215 years later, as the site of a mass grave for more than 1,000 Jews murdered in the ghetto. By the 1960s all traces of the Jewish community had been erased, together with any shame of