Babi Yar. Context The most harrowing detail in Sergei Loznitsa’s Babi Yar. Context is not an image but a sound. Culled entirely from archive footage shot by Nazi and Soviet filmmakers, the film chronicles of one of the darkest chapters in World War II and Jewish history, the massacre of nearly 34,000 Jews in German-occupied Kiev in September 1941. But it opens with a tragedy from three months before, the pogrom that decimated the Jewish community in Lvov—now Lviv—a city in western Ukraine. It’s June 30, 1941; no sooner have the Nazis arrived in town than the local Jews are accused of working for Stalin’s secret police, and forced to exhume the bodies of fellow Ukrainians whom Soviet forces murdered and buried in the city’s prison. The corpses, mostly males, are brought out in the courtyard, and a small army of women (their mothers? Wives? Sisters?) rushes to identify their loved ones.
- 4/1/2022
- MUBI
Sergei Loznitsa's The Event (2015), which is receiving an exclusive global online premiere on Mubi, is showing from August 4 - September 3, 2017 as a Special Discovery. “Questions are only dangerous when you answer them.”—Toby Esterhase, Smiley’s People“Resign! Resign! Resign!”—St. Petersburg crowd, 19 August 199119 August 1991. Sergei Loznitsa is packing his bags in Kiev: having recently left his job at the city’s Institute of Cybernetics, he is about to enroll at Moscow Film School. The phone rings; it’s a friend. Loznitsa, at his pal’s suggestion, turns on the television. All four state channels, interspersed with news flashes, are broadcasting the same thing: Swan Lake—on repeat. Updates come through haphazardly. In Moscow, there are tanks in the streets. By noon, there is something resembling a clearer picture: Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, on vacation in the Crimea, has taken ill. A state of emergency is declared. Loznitsa walks...
- 8/4/2017
- MUBI
"Sergei Loznitsa’s The Event makes a striking follow-up, if not strictly a companion piece, to his Maidan, which documented the recent political protests in Ukraine," begins Jonathan Romney in Screen. "In his new film, the Belarus-born director documents similarly turbulent and decisive events in Russia, nearly 25 years ago, but this time exclusively through archive footage—a technique he previously used in his 2006 film Blockade, about the Siege of Leningrad." The film premiered in Venice, then screened in Toronto, and we've got more reviews and the trailer. » - David Hudson...
- 9/21/2015
- Keyframe
"Sergei Loznitsa’s The Event makes a striking follow-up, if not strictly a companion piece, to his Maidan, which documented the recent political protests in Ukraine," begins Jonathan Romney in Screen. "In his new film, the Belarus-born director documents similarly turbulent and decisive events in Russia, nearly 25 years ago, but this time exclusively through archive footage—a technique he previously used in his 2006 film Blockade, about the Siege of Leningrad." The film premiered in Venice, then screened in Toronto, and we've got more reviews and the trailer. » - David Hudson...
- 9/21/2015
- Fandor: Keyframe
Going UNDERGROUNDEverybody and their dog, it seems, feels this off imperative to try to identify common themes in the handful of festival films they (we) (I) see in a given year. It's the Ghost of Hegel, I suppose, demanding that we make sense of our times by referring to some Zeitgeist. (Zeitgeist? Isn't this just as likely to Strand the FilmsWeLike in some oh-so-precious Music Box, to be unearthed years later by members of some as-yet-unassembled Cinema Guild? But I digress.) There may or may not be tendencies running through this year's feature selections, and if there are, that could have as much to do with the people who selected them than with any global mood. But there does seem to be a generalized turning-inward, with filmmakers making works about themselves and their immediate lives, the cinematic process, and the very complexities of communicating with other human beings. There are...
- 9/17/2015
- by Michael Sicinski
- MUBI
I wanted to talk to Sergei Loznitsa about time because My Joy (which Daniel Kasman wrote about in this year's Cannes coverage) begins with a body being thrown into a concrete mixer and then there's a truck driver lost in a Russian backwater and then a prostitute and then a scene set over half a century earlier and none of these changes represent detours or dovetails, but a continuous forward movement through a "time" (cinematic / historical / narrative) that is folding in on itself. My Joy is an anti-psychological film in the sense that, instead of portraying time the way its characters see it, it portrays its characters as they are seen by time: as echoes. But of course there were other questions as well—about his background as a documentary filmmaker, about his next feature, about the presence of a couple of prominent Romanian New Wave figures in his film—which the erudite Loznitsa,...
- 9/29/2010
- MUBI
Sergei Loznitsa’s debut feature titled My Joy is a story of a truck driver who loses his way in the Russian wilderness and gets drawn into daily life in a Russian village.
Interesting or not, the film is the part of Cannes In Competition screening, set for May 19 and we are here today to have a little chat about this Loznitsa’s project, simple post-Soviet reality story that goes like this…
“…a tale of truck driver Georgi who leaves his hometown with his truck laden with goods, but when he is forced to take a wrong turn on the motorway, he finds himself stranded in the middle of nowhere. Georgi desperately tries to find his way out, but gradually, against his will, he becomes drawn into the daily life of a Russian village.
In a place, where brutal force and the instinct to survive overcome humanity and common sense,...
Interesting or not, the film is the part of Cannes In Competition screening, set for May 19 and we are here today to have a little chat about this Loznitsa’s project, simple post-Soviet reality story that goes like this…
“…a tale of truck driver Georgi who leaves his hometown with his truck laden with goods, but when he is forced to take a wrong turn on the motorway, he finds himself stranded in the middle of nowhere. Georgi desperately tries to find his way out, but gradually, against his will, he becomes drawn into the daily life of a Russian village.
In a place, where brutal force and the instinct to survive overcome humanity and common sense,...
- 5/17/2010
- by Fiona
- Filmofilia
Sergei Loznitsa’s debut feature titled My Joy is a story of a truck driver who loses his way in the Russian wilderness and gets drawn into daily life in a Russian village.
Interesting or not, the film is the part of Cannes In Competition screening, set for May 19 and we are here today to have a little chat about this Loznitsa’s project, simple post-Soviet reality story that goes like this…
“…a tale of truck driver Georgi who leaves his hometown with his truck laden with goods, but when he is forced to take a wrong turn on the motorway, he finds himself stranded in the middle of nowhere. Georgi desperately tries to find his way out, but gradually, against his will, he becomes drawn into the daily life of a Russian village.
In a place, where brutal force and the instinct to survive overcome humanity and common sense,...
Interesting or not, the film is the part of Cannes In Competition screening, set for May 19 and we are here today to have a little chat about this Loznitsa’s project, simple post-Soviet reality story that goes like this…
“…a tale of truck driver Georgi who leaves his hometown with his truck laden with goods, but when he is forced to take a wrong turn on the motorway, he finds himself stranded in the middle of nowhere. Georgi desperately tries to find his way out, but gradually, against his will, he becomes drawn into the daily life of a Russian village.
In a place, where brutal force and the instinct to survive overcome humanity and common sense,...
- 5/15/2010
- by Fiona
- Filmofilia
We're all for getting out in the summertime, but there might not be anything more refreshing than cooling off in a movie theater... or seeing a movie in the comfort of your air-conditioned home on demand, on DVD, or online... or better yet catching a classic on the big screen at a nearby repertory theater. With literally hundreds of films to choose from this summer, we humbly present this guide to the season's most exciting offerings.
May 1
"Eldorado"
The Cast: Bouli Lanners, Fabrice Adde, Philippe Nahon, Didier Toupy, Franise Chichy
Director: Bouli Lanners
Fest Cred: Cannes, Warsaw, Glasgow, Palm Springs,
The Gist: When Elie (Adde), a hapless young thief attempts to rob Yvan (Lanners), a 40-year-old car dealer, the two form a unlikely friendship that leads to a road trip across Belgium in this slight comedy that won the Best European Film at the Director's Fortnight at Cannes last year.
May 1
"Eldorado"
The Cast: Bouli Lanners, Fabrice Adde, Philippe Nahon, Didier Toupy, Franise Chichy
Director: Bouli Lanners
Fest Cred: Cannes, Warsaw, Glasgow, Palm Springs,
The Gist: When Elie (Adde), a hapless young thief attempts to rob Yvan (Lanners), a 40-year-old car dealer, the two form a unlikely friendship that leads to a road trip across Belgium in this slight comedy that won the Best European Film at the Director's Fortnight at Cannes last year.
- 5/6/2009
- by Stephen Saito
- ifc.com
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