Trial documentaries: Soviet Lithuanian documentary cinema and the Holocaust in the 1960s

The ‘second wave’ of war crimes trials in the Soviet Union in the 1960s led to the re-emergence of trial documentaries. This article examines how trial films made in the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic represented the history of Soviet post-war justice and portrayed both Nazi collaborators and their Jewish victims. The article not only explores the production process of these documentaries by presenting the political, social and cinematic contexts of their creation, but also discusses their cinematic language, the process of censorship, the prescribed ideological function, and (albeit limited) the reception. It demonstrates that these documentaries, even if commissioned by the highest state authorities, managed to manoeuvre between the official representation of the history of the Second World War, the personal war experiences of the filmmakers, and their artistic skills of filmmaking. This article shows how the categories of law, cinema and the Holocaust were interrelated in Soviet Lithuania during the Thaw.