Mr. Landsbergis
Sergei Loznitsa
Lithuania, Netherlands. 2021. 246 min.
Imperialism continues to be part of Russia’s political and social reality, as the war in Ukraine clearly demonstrates. Taking a close look at the colonial regimes of the former Russian and Soviet empires, as well as examining the process of their fall, thus feels more important than ever.
In this context, Pushkin House, in partnership with Bertha DocHouse, presents the British premiere of Sergei Loznitsa's Mr. Landsbergis. Winner of the top prize at IDFA, the film tells the absorbing story of Lithuania’s fight for independence between 1988 and 1993. This epic documentary focuses on music professor Vytautas Landsbergis, who became the first Head of Parliament of Lithuania after it left the Soviet Union. Along with the portrait of this charismatic man, Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Lozntisa offers an author's look at the archival footage of the peaceful protests against the Soviet regime that are often called the "singing revolution". This reflection on the persistent democratic movement towards freedom becomes an important historical lesson about Soviet imperialism.
The screening will be followed by a Zoom Q&A with film director Sergei Loznitsa and film scholar Professor Ian Christie.
This event will take place at Bertha DocHouse.
This event is organised as part of Pushkin Book Weeks – a series of events dedicated to Russian culture and its translation as well as to wider literary and cultural debate and learning.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Sergei Loznitsa is a Ukrainian film director who was born in 1964 in Belarus. 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 23 award-winning documentaries and 4 fiction films. In 2018, he received the prize for Best Directing of the Un Certain Regard section of Festival de Cannes for his fourth feature film Donbass. His feature-length documentary film Maidan (2014), the chronicles of the Ukrainian revolution, had its world premiere at a Séance Special of Festival de Cannes, while The Event (2015), Austerlitz (2016), The Trial (2018) and State Funeral (2019) were presented at the Venice International Film Festival.
Ian Christie is a film historian, curator and broadcaster. He has been Anniversary Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck College, University of London, since 1999 and is a Fellow of the British Academy. He has written and edited books on early film, Powell and Pressburger, Russian cinema, Scorsese and Gilliam; and worked on exhibitions ranging from Film as Film (Hayward, 1979), Eisenstein: His Life and Art (MoMA Oxford, 1988) and Twilight of the Tsars (Hayward, 1991) to Spellbound: Art and Film (Hayward, 1996) and Modernism: Designing a New World (V&A, 2006). He was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1994. His current research interests include the history of production design, early (and new) optical media, the cultural impact of film in the digital era and the potential of experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience to tell us more about what (and why) we experience on screen.