Film Description

At the core of the documentary film “Trials” is the story of the tragic and nearly forgotten events of modern Russian history – the Godless authorities’ campaign to eliminate the Church.

After the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, with the pretence of the famine, the Soviet regime imposed the requisition of all ecclesiastic goods and started to ransack the churches. The authorities’ true motive was not providing assistance to those who needed it, but rather a hunger for wealth and power, and hatred toward God. The first wave of repression hit the priests that resisted to profanation and violence: the “demonstrative” trial against both Catholics and Orthodox priests talks not only about the fate of those who suffered, accepting a martyr’s death, but also analyzes the senselessness and perniciousness of the internal divisions in the church before the threat of the God-fighting regime, which yearned to exterminate the entire Church.

The film is strictly documentary, and the screenplay is based on Soviet newsreels from those years, old photographs and consultations with priests. You’ll be amazed by the unique newsreel clips, the expressive faces of condemned Christians, the festivity of the victors-destructors, the counting up of the “spoils” – the caskets to preserve saints’ relics, cups for the Eucharist, icons being carried out of churches – and the destruction of entire churches…. A good director and a well thought-out text make the film an unforgettable testimony.