This fourth fiction film by Sergei Loznitsa is dedicated to the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine, where a hybrid war has been going on since 2014 and evolved into a full-scale invasion in 2022. The war has involved from the very beginning into open armed conflict, and killings and robberies on a mass scale perpetrated by separatist gangs. In the Donbas, war is called peace, propaganda is uttered as truth and hatred is declared to be love. A journey through the Donbas unfolds as a chain of curious adventures, where the grotesque and drama are as intertwined as life and death. This is not a tale of one region, one country or one political system. It is about a world lost in post-truth and fake identities. Today, it is about each and every one of us.
This event is part of Witnessing History, a comprehensive programme celebrating the multifaceted oeuvre of Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa, taking place from 2–10 June. Loznitsa has established himself as one of Europe’s leading filmmakers, producing numerous award-winning documentaries and feature films over a twenty-five-year career. In his work, he dares to dispassionately consider the most painful and important pages of history without compromising the current social and political agenda.
The screening will take place at The Garden Cinema.
FILMMAKER’S BIOGRAPHY
Sergei Loznitsa is a Ukrainian film director who was born in 1964 in Baranovichi (USSR). He grew up in Kyiv, where he graduated from the Kyiv Polytechnic and worked as a scientist. In 1997, he graduated from the Russian State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) in Moscow, where he studied feature filmmaking. Sergei Loznitsa has been making films since 1996, and by now he has directed 26 award-winning documentaries and four fiction films. In 2018, Loznitsa received the prize for Best Directing of the Un Certain Regard section of Festival de Cannes for his fourth feature film, Donbass (2018). Sergei’s feature-length documentaries Maidan (2014) and Natural History of Destruction (2022) had their world premieres at Festival de Cannes, while The Event (2015), Austerlitz (2016), The Trial (2018), State Funeral (2019) and The Kiev Trial (2022) were presented at the Venice International Film Festival. Sergei Loznitsa continues to work in both documentary and fiction genres.