This article compares the Soviet Georgian film Repentance (Tengiz Abuladze, 1987) with the contemporary Austrian film Murer: Anatomy of a Trial (Christian Frosch, 2018), arguing that, through their courtroom scenes, these films put their respective nations on trial. Drawing on scholarship related to the trial film genre as well as on discourse related to law and justice (Hannah Arendt, Shoshana Felman), I show how, whether dealing with the crimes of Stalinism or Nazism, these films seek to confront their audiences with hitherto repressed aspects of their countries’ historical legacies.
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Katya Krylova (2024) studied this question.
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