Sergei Loznitsa (right) during his masterclass at the Visions du Réel documentary festival that takes place every year in Nyon in western Switzerland.
©Nikita Thevoz
Sergei Loznitsa, one of the most acclaimed filmmakers of his generation, was recently subject of a retrospective at Visions du Réel, the major Swiss documentary festival. Born in Belarus and raised in Ukraine, Loznitsa is unrelenting in his reckoning with Russia’s imperial power. So why is he highly controversial in Ukraine?
Sergei Loznitsa is impossible to catch these days. Since his Gulag drama Two Prosecutors opened across Europe and the United States, the director is on a grand tour. New York’s Metrograph External linkscreened his documentaries on the Ukrainian conflict; the American CinemathequeExternal link followed with an eclectic selection; and now Visions du Réel, which ended on April 26, curated a substantial retrospective, celebrating External linkhis cinematic devotion to “the post-Soviet territory and memory through its upheavals and cycles of violence”.
Loznitsa’s documentaries carry the signature of a master chronicler of (post-)Soviet metamorphoses. His protagonist is the crowd, framed in wide compositions and vast landscapes that become a canvas to contemplate countless lives caught in trials, revolutions and wars. Uninterested in sentimentality or heroism, he studies humanity like a historian, an approach that was set in his early works.
Blockade (2006) distilled three-and-a-half hours of archival footage of siege-starved Leningrad into an hour-long film. These very few hours of surviving footageExternal link are part of the tragedy, for they do not do justice to the 900-day German siege during Second World War in which over half a million city residents died, most of them from starvation. With no commentary, the catastrophe speaks for itself.
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Working across fiction, documentary and the elusive border between both genres, Loznitsa seems most at home in the editing room. State Funeral (2019), his monumental picture of the state farewell to Stalin, is his genuine masterpiece. The hypnotic spectacle teaches the viewer more about the Soviet “soul”, its rituals and state tyranny than any textbook could.
As endless processions of mourners outgrow the figure of Stalin, they form a portrait of the Soviet Union caught in the moment of its own mass transformation. The sound design of trusted collaborator Vladimir Golovnitsky lends a sensory charge to the mute footage, reconstructing voices, noises and music.
Archival mastery
Loznitsa’s devotion to archives optimises their function: making the past speak of the present. The way the aerial footage of The Natural History of Destruction (2022) glides over bombarded German cities rhymes with current videos from Ukraine.
The Trial (2018), reassembled from propaganda footage of a 1930s tribunal, reads straight onto the lawlessness of Russian justice today. The Event (2015), built from footage of the August 1991 coup attempt in Leningrad, feels urgent as Russia retreats into the very authoritarianism that moment tried to end.
Against the backdrop of war, Western critics have elevated External linkLoznitsa to the leading voice of Ukrainian cinema, praising his unshakeable interrogation of Russian imperialism. The shorthand is flattering, but it skips over his ongoing conflict with the Ukrainian film industry, which does not quite share in the applause.
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Having quit the European Film Academy over its weak response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Loznitsa was even more disturbed by their subsequent call to boycott Russian culture, which he denounced External linkas “absurd”. Such rhetoric came as an unpleasant surprise to the Ukrainian Film Academy and served as grounds to expel him. “Now, when Ukraine is struggling to defend its independence, the key concept in the rhetoric of every Ukrainian should be his national identity,” its statement External linkread at the time.
“Unfortunately, this is Nazism,” Loznitsa wrote back External linkto the Ukrainian “academics” (his quotation marks). He used the moment to answer accusations of cosmopolitanism levelled at him, equating the charge with a Stalinist mindset: the denial of dissent, the reliance on hatred, the betrayal of the European values Ukraine is striving for.
The zone of trauma
At the 2023 Jerusalem Film Festival, his partner and producer Maria Choustova told External linkIsraeli newspaper Haaretz that Loznitsa’s suspension stemmed “partly from jealousy and partly from hard-line rightist views”. “These are people [the Ukrainian “academics”] who are deeply traumatised,” she said.
Loznitsa himself has long lived outside that zone of war trauma. Born in Belarus and raised in Ukraine, his late 20s were spent in Moscow for film education, and since 2001 he commutes External linkbetween Berlin and Vilnius.
Ukrainian filmmaker Vitaly Mansky recently alluded External linkto Loznitsa in an interview. “One powerful director writes everywhere that he is a Ukrainian artist, though he doesn’t live in Ukraine and doesn’t even shoot his films there. If there were no war, I wouldn’t pay attention. As it is, it’s simply tactless.”
Nonetheless, Loznitsa’s trajectory is bound up with Ukraine’s modern history, and for a while this alignment was mutually beneficial: he gained the cachet of a Ukrainian auteur while his films drew attention to the war.
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Analysing Ukraine
When his chronicles explore fascist territory and Ukraine’s recent history, the author’s own voice emerges more explicitly. His uncompromising views on Ukrainian culture and identity provoke a dialogue that is essential but fatalistic in its habit of arriving at the wrong moment.
Stylistically, his documentaries drawn from current events differ little from the archival ones. Maidan (2014), a quintessential film about the Maidan Revolution (also known as the Revolution of Dignity), offers a comprehensive portrait of the upheaval at the heart of Kyiv. Here, the seemingly omniscient, distanced gaze on the protests also owes something to the fact External linkthat Loznitsa shot only parts of the film himself, passing instructions to his cameraman for the rest.
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Where Maidan’s restraint was offset by the crowd’s revolutionary spirit, follow-up The Invasion (2024) is even more austere. This time the director produced an observational documentary about the war without actually observing it himself. Working remotely, through the eyes of two cinematographers, what emerges is a mosaic portrait of grief and resistance across the country whose attempts at decolonisation are cast in tragic light.
In one scene a woman walks into a bookshop, asking where to place her Russian-language books. It turns out the shop pulps them – the conveyor belt to their death draws the film’s tightest close-ups. For Loznitsa, this scene was painful to watch. “It’s a pity people don’t learn anything from these experiences,” he concludedExternal link.
Riskier notions about the danger of unlearned lessons surface in another major work, Babi Yar. Context (2021). Edited from footage of the Nazi massacre of Kyiv’s Jews during the Second World War, the film presses on an unexamined fact in Ukrainian memory: the city’s residents did not resist the mass shootings, and in places assisted them.
In Ukraine, though the film was praised for its formal excellence, it was also met External linkwith unease for opening a fraught chapter of Ukrainian history without the careful contextual nuance it demanded. Loznitsa has pushed back on readings of the film as an indictment of present-day Ukraine, telling External linkthe magazine Film Comment that the country is “radically different” today and “not yet dominated by the ideas of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists”. The OUN is a far-right Ukrainian organisation.
The matter of distance
Sergei Loznitsa at the 71st Cannes Film Festival, where he won the Best Director award for ‘Donbass’ in the parallel section ‘Un Certain Regard’, May 2018.
Keystone-EPA/Clemens Bilan
When Russian propaganda peddles tales of Ukrainian neo-Nazis, exhuming this theme onto the open wounds of war hardly makes for productive dialogue. Less so when, during peace negotiations, the Russians still demand the “denazification” of Ukraine – which is seen by Ukrainians as a code for rejecting their country’s sovereignty and heritage.
For Ukrainians, preserving that identity is an existential fight, both literal and metaphorical, and the directors do not have the luxury of making cinema for historical lessons or artistic pleasure. For them, the camera is a weapon, a record of war crimes and suffering.
The standoff around Loznitsa speaks not only to the practices and ethics of the war documentary, but also asks a broader question: where does Western support for Ukrainian resilience end, once the country’s own decisions about its culture and identity become uncomfortable to watch?
Perhaps the one distance Loznitsa’s filmography has never quite mastered is the ethical one – a matter of patience, and tactful empathy.
Despite repeated requests, Swissinfo was unable to arrange an interview with the Sergei Loznitsa.
Edited by Virginie Mangin & Eduardo Simantob/ts
