Tribute to Sergei 13-18/08/2022Loznitsa
Sergei Loznitsa was born in 1964. He grew up in Kyiv (Ukraine), and graduated from the Kyiv Polytechnic in 1987 with a degree in Applied Mathematics. Between 1987 and 1991 he worked as a scientist at the Kiev Institute of Cybernetics, specializing in artificial intelligence research. In 1997, Loznitsa graduated from the Russian State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) in Moscow, where he studied filmmaking. Sergei Loznitsa has been making films since 1996, and has by now directed 25 award-winning documentaries and four fiction films. Loznitsa’s feature debut MY JOY (2010) premiered in the main competition at the Fes tival de Cannes, followed by his next feature film IN THE FOG (2012), which was awarded the FIPRESCI prize at the 65th Festival de Cannes. In 2017, Sergei Loznitsa presented his third feature A GENTLE CREATURE, also in competition at the Festival de Cannes. In 2018, Loznitsa received the Best Director award of the Un Certain Regard section at the Festival de Cannes for his fourth feature film, DONBASS. In 2013 Sergei Loznitsa founded film production company ATOMS & VOID. Sergei Loznitsa’s feature-length documentary MAIDAN (2014) - which chronicles the Ukrainian revolution - had its world premiere as a Séance Special at the Fes tival de Cannes. His subsequent feature length documentaries, THE EVENT (2015), AUSTERLITZ (2016), THE TRIAL (2018) and STATE FUNERAL (2019) were presented as Spe cial Screenings at the Venice Film Festival. In 2021 Sergei received a Special Jury Prize, L’Oeil D’Or Award, in Cannes for his film BABI YAR. CONTEXT. Loznitsa’s most recent film, THE NATURAL HISTORY OF DESTRUCTION, premiered as a Special Screening at the 75th Festival de Cannes in 2022. Sergei Loznitsa continues to work both in documentary and feature genres.
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Director: Sergei Loznitsa Cast: Alexey Vertkov, Maria Varsami, Olga Shuvalova, Viktor Nemets, Vlad Ivanov, Vladimir Golovin, Yuriy Sviridenko Wednesday, 17/08/2022 Meeting Point Cinema, 15:00 In the Fog Germany, Russia, Latvia, Netherlands, Belarus, 2012, Colour, 128 min.
Director: Sergei Loznitsa Tuesday, 16/08/2022 Meeting Point Cinema, 15:00 My Joy Ukraine, Germany, Netherlands, 2010, Colour, 127 min.
Director: Sergei Loznitsa Cast: Boris Kamorzin, Valeriu Andriuță, Tamara Yatsenko, Liudmila Smorodina, Olesya Zhurakovskaya, Sergei Russkin, Petro Panchuk, Irina Plesnyaeva, Zhanna Lubgane, Vadim Dobuvsky, Alexander Zamurayev, Gerogy Deliev Monday, 15/08/2022 Meeting Point Cinema, 15:00 Babi Yar. Context Netherlands, Ukraine, 2021, Colour and B&W, 121 min.
Nicholas Davies Cover Photo © ATOMS & VOID © Sarajevo Film Festival 2022
Tribute to Sergei 13-18/08/2022Loznitsa
Director: Sergei Loznitsa Publisher Sarajevo Film Festival Editor-in-Chief Izeta Građević Art Director Lejla Begić Vuletić Proofreading
Director: Sergei Loznitsa Reflections. Director’s Cut France, Netherlands, 2014, Black and white, 17 min.
Director: Sergei Loznitsa Sunday, 14/08/2022 Meeting Point Cinema, 15:00 Donbass Germany, Ukraine, France, Netherlands, Romania, 2018, Colour, 121 min.
Tribute to Sergei Loznitsa / 28th Sarajevo Film Festival | 3 Saturday, 13/08/2022 Meeting Point Cinema, 15:00 Maidan Netherlands, 2014, Colour, 131 min.
Director: Sergei Loznitsa Cast: Vladimir Svirski, Vlad Abashin, Sergei Kolesov, Vlad Ivanov, Julia Peresild, Nadezhda Markina Thursday, 18/08/2022 Meeting Point Cinema, 15:00 Portrait Russia, 2002, Black and white, 28 min.
Director: Sergei Loznitsa A Night at the Opera Netherlands, France, 2020, Black and white, 20 min.
Whether they concern the Second World War, Russian society past or present, or the independence movements of the peoples of the former Soviet Bloc – starting with Ukraine, where he lived throughout his youth – Loznitsa’s films are always invitations to question mechanisms of power and submission, as well as possible paths to eman cipation and responsibility, both collective and individual. These multiple approaches mobilise considerable historical and political knowledge, but also, and above all, an inventive sensitivity in the composition of sequences and in the organisation of shots, demonstrating this filmmaker as an undisputed master of editing.
cinematicthatpossibilitiesexistonlyinlanguage to discover something new”
It took him a little over twenty years and some twenty-five films of very different lengths and nature but Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa has built both an essential work of cinema in the contemporary landscape and a kind of machine for understanding the present. Originally trained as a scientist, the director, born in 1964 and having benefited from the best training Moscow’s VGIK film school had to offer in the early 1990s, re counts the processes by which he developed new working methods for a prolific body of work that combines documentary, film montage and fiction.
4 | Tribute to Sergei Loznitsa / 28th Sarajevo Film Festival
Deeply involved in all stages of the making of his films, constantly seeking to de velop new resources of cinematographic language, Loznitsa speaks here about how he combines scientific procedures and intuition, personal theoretical requirements, and the fruitfulness of working with others, while highlighting the immense diversity of refer ences that inspire him and help him to make his way with originality and strength. This artist, who has built himself up through his refusal of Soviet lead weight, embodies, among the current challenges and conflicts, the claim of humanism without frontiers, nourished by an immense anxiety in the face of the onward march of the world. J.-M.F.
Interview with Sergei Loznitsa Jean-Michel Frodon
“I try to use the
You studied cinema at VGIK, the famous film school in Moscow. Your main professor was the excellent Geor gian director Nana Djordjadze. How would you define her teaching, her personal touch inside the VGIK programme? I applied twice to become a student at VGIK, in 1990 and 1991, and I was refused twice. I was already old to become again a student. Each time, I was accepted at the first level of the entrance exam, a conversation, and refused at the second step, where you have to write a short script based on three words that are given to you. It does not make sense at all for me. But when I was refused the second time, in 1991, I went to see Nana Djordjaze, who was one of the masters at VGIK, and I begged her to accept me as an auditor, as an unregis tered student. One needs to understand the very special spirit of this time, just after the collapse of the USSR. Djordjadze was there, in this position at VGIK, due to this atmosphere. Originally, another filmmaker had been named in this position – Iouri Ozerov, a tradition al Soviet director who specialised in propaganda war movies. But he was rejected by the students, a group that included Sharunas Bartas, who instead imposed the nomination of two very creative Georgians, Djordjaze and Irakli Kvirikadze. So, I went to meet her and told her I was already twenty-seven years old and I could not wait, and she accepted. At this moment in many places in Russia and the former Soviet states there was hope that a lot of things would be possible.
What we learned in VGIK was not only technical — it was also what one could call humanitarian education: foreign literature, Russian literature, the history of art, of theatre, of cinema, of music, philosophy, perception theory, cultural theory… Ah! And musical composi tion, we had to compose musical pieces according to various structures. I still use that in some of my films, – STATE FUNERAL5 is based on a symphonic pattern, when others are more like sonatas or fugues.
Tribute to Sergei Loznitsa / 28th Sarajevo Film Festival | 5
What happened for you at VGIK? Did you enjoy and ben efit from this period of your life? A lot! As I said, I was an auditor for a year and a half, then I was included in the regular programme, which I had attended in full since the beginning anyway. There were incredibly brilliant professors there, including many from the old Soviet tradition, people with amaz ing knowledge, an immense diversity of culture and a will to teach, to share. I am extremely grateful to all of them, they literally made me. I am still in debt to them.
I remember Nina Alexandrovna Nossova, our professor of literature, invited Otar Iosseliani to speak to us for the first class. He had himself been a student at VGIK, his professor was Alexander Dovzhenko, so you could feel this sense of a long-term transmission. It was really impressive. For the second class, she invited Tarko vsky! She was really old, almost eighty – she fibbed about her age so she could continue teaching. Also, we had three years of learning theatre – twice a year we had to present a short play on stage. Djordjadze found a great professor for us, Stanislav Mitin, who would later become a film director. Thanks to him, when I started to direct fiction films, I knew how to work with actors. Of course, there were also the more technical classes, a wonderful professor about sound, Iliana Pop ova – I owe a lot to her for my way of working with sound, which is so important in my films. We spent a lot of time examining the sound of Godard’s films, and it was really productive. I learned editing with a wonderful woman who had worked with Artavazd Pel echian, Ludmila Petrovna Volkova. And as much as she could, Djordjadze tried to invite people who had also worked outside the Soviet Union, people with as many experiences as possible. Different professors had dif ferent ideas, different concepts, and they would fight for them, which was also very productive in terms of education. Because education is not only about hav ing a certain amount of knowledge but about the way it questions human beings and society in so many ways. VGIK at this time was really fertile ground. I started there together with Alexei Guerman, Jr, with Alexander Zviagintsev, Boris Khlebnikov, and others. It really was the cradle of a new generation. It is so sad that VGIK as it was then does not exist anymore, now professors and students are on the wrong side, supporting this hor rible regime. All the spirit of freedom and discovery has been crushed. I assume being a film student included watching a lot of films. Yes, this was the second major dimension of our stud ies, though not mainly inside VGIK itself. We spent the whole day in the film school, and every evening I was at the Museum of Cinema, which had just been created by Naum Kleiman2, who was also a major influence. I watched at least one film every evening, thanks to all the major retrospectives of the best directors from all over the world that Kleiman organised. He offered me, and my fellow students, an incomparable understand ing of cinema. Kino Musee was my second school, to gether with VGIK. But it is destroyed now.
If someone asks about where you live now, what would you(Laughs).answer? Difficult to say. Today I am in Berlin, tomor row I fly to Lithuania, then back to Germany, then I’ll go to Majorca, and afterwards to Sarajevo… Regularly, I now live in Berlin, but over the last two years I spent most of my time in Vilnius, where I made three films. And next autumn I will be there to work on a stage play, as well as to direct more films. I also often go to Bucha rest, and to Kyiv. So, I guess the answer to your ques tion is that I live in Europe.
Directing a stage play is something new for you… Oh yes, I had never thought it would happen. For two years, a theatre director has been trying to get me to direct a play. He proposed I work with Jonathan Littell and his novel THE KINDLY ONES1. I finally decided to give it a try, I believe I have found a way to bring this immense literary work to the stage. You were raised in Ukraine (at the time, part of the USSR). You were trained as a filmmaker in Russia and began your cinema career there; now you live in Germany. To what extent would you say that the countries you belong to – if “belong” means anything – are important to what you do? Wherever I stay, I am surrounded by books, and I have my computer. Ultimately, I guess they are my country. I could be almost anywhere, as long as I have this en vironment and as long as I can keep doing my work. I try to be where I can make my films in less disturbing conditions, and that’s all. Berlin is very convenient and welcoming, so it is good base camp, but if something were to make it more difficult, I would move.
You studied and began to work in a high-level scientific do main, mathematics, cybernetics, decision processes. To what extent would you say this knowledge, or even more this way of thinking, is still present in your work as a filmmaker? The fundamental thing I got from mathematics is deal ing with objects that do not exist. Mathematics deals with ideal objects, abstract objects that help us under stand the real world and to act on it. Film directors should be aware that what we deal with is not real, it’s abstract, it’s artificial, but it does interact with reality, in many ways. Instead of real, singular objects, mathemat ics work with models, always. To make a film is also to build a model, in a way. And, as in mathematics, the specific kind of model that a film is at some point meets reality, and is proved right or wrong by reality. Both mathematics and cinema are means to try to discover the universe, through models (equations in one case, films in the other) that have to confront reality and be proved correct or not.
Were some classes especially important for you?
Would you say that what you just explained is mostly about the original idea, about the shooting, about the editing? It’s about every stage of filmmaking. When I direct a film, I try to isolate certain themes, certain topics, to focus on. This, of course, provides the definition of the project, but also the preparation, the pre-production stage. It is also decisive during every aspect of the shooting. Finally, it is present during editing but with a different dimension, because editing has to find its way through two different approaches – it has to deal with the narrative, which relates to literature, and it has to deal with the composition, which relates to music – and here we acknowledge that, in its own ways, music also relates to mathematics. Only cinema has the possibility of drawing on all these approaches to build a certain perception and understanding of the world.
Would you say this is why you became a filmmaker, among the many options you had? Exactly. I always try to use the possibilities that ex ist only in cinematic language to say and to discover something. Each time I make a film, I try to discover something unknown to me. In one way, each film is a kind of theorem I have to prove, like in mathematics. But the nature of the proof is different. So, mathematics helps me a lot. When I was young, I worked in a cyber netics institution, about expert systems, where you need to elaborate on new communication concepts, seeking to be accurate in the description of factual elements in a particular language – it can be our common languages, or specific languages designed for machines, what we sometimes call programmes. Something very important regarding languages, all of them, is that, as long as you are among those who use any specific language, you cannot see the flaws, the mistakes, the misunderstand ings. You need to take a step aside to become aware of those, and this is what mathematics, or cinema, does, through models.
What made you move from Kyiv to Moscow at the begin ning of the 1990s, and then from Moscow to Berlin at the beginning of the 2000s? I spent my first twenty-seven years in Kyiv. After that, I decided to move on, change my field of work and en ter the world of cinema, which was completely new for me. It was a completely intuitive move. And then I spent eight years in a film school, which is huge. It is only af ter directing my third film, in 2000, that I was finally sure this is what I was meant to do, that I had taken the right direction. And after that I kept moving to wherever seemed to be the most suitable place for me to make my next films. Which quite soon meant that I should move from Moscow to Berlin: this was at the moment when it became very clear to me what would happen in Rus sia, and which we unfortunately now see in full, terrible light. Going to Ukraine at that moment was not really an option, there was almost no Ukrainian cinema then. Moving to Germany, from where I travelled a lot, al lowed me to make one or two films a year.
6 | Tribute to Sergei Loznitsa / 28th Sarajevo Film Festival THE TRAIN STATION (2000) SETTLEMENT (2001) BLOCKADE (2005) BLOCKADE (2005)BLOCKADE (2005) THE EVENT (2015) THE EVENT (2015) THE TRAIN STATION (2000)
I wonder if you ever related with another major filmmaker of the previous generation, Kira Muratova3 She was my dear friend! I met her pretty late, in 2010. It was after a screening of MY JOY. She was very straight forward, she told me, “you are better when you docu mentary” (laughs). She was right, of course – it was my first fiction film and I had made many mistakes. After wards, I sent her every new film I made, she was always among the very first viewers and her comments were always so right and useful. I don’t understand why she is not better known – she is the one who described the Soviet subconscious the most accurately. No one suc ceeded so well in building an image of this incredible dark zone in which millions and millions of people lived for decades. ASTHENIC SYNDROME is an unrivalled masterpiece in this. But it’s not only about the past: in 1989, when she shot the film, she was already describ ing the world as it is now. The film was prophetic as well as hyper-lucid about the reality of the recent past. When I showed her MAIDAN – in Odessa, where she lived –she was angry about the film, in the sense that she felt that it was promoting violence. For her, any violence dehumanises people. I see now how right she was. In her last feature film, ETERNAL HOMECOMING in 2012, she really invented a new element of cinema language –which is very rare – by making the quality of the acting an element of the dramaturgy itself. Nobody had done that before. Of course, she belonged both to Russian and Ukrainian culture, if someone would have asked her to choose she would have seen him as a madman, as a character from ASTHENIC SYNDROME (laughs).
One of the major and very impressive aspects of BLOCK ADE is the work you did on the sound, together with Vladimir Golovnitski, the sound engineer who would be come perhaps your closest creative partner since. I had already made LANDSCAPE with him in 2003, and he has worked on every film I have made since –except MR LANDSBERGIS, as when I made it in 2021, he was working on another film. Anyway, he is obvi ously someone very important to all my work. And yes, his input was decisive for BLOCKADE – without him, I could not have made the film, at least, not this way and not with these effects. He was the first to propose that we recreate all the sounds, which was a major improve ment for building the very specific atmosphere that radi ates from the film. Yes, that was his idea. Though the sounds we hear always relate with the images, the soundtrack of BLOCKADE is not exactly realistic. It is more like a musical composition based on realistic sounds. Of course. The whole process is based on the idea of choice, on focusing on something that is in the image but that will acquire particular significance due to the sound that accompanies it. It is like in drawings – you only draw the main lines, the most significant ones; ide ally you want to render the motif with as few strokes as possible. I compare what we did with sound to Picasso’s drawings: he is so great in showing a lot of someone’s face, or whatever, with a minimum of visual elements.
Then you made several short documentaries that followed a kind of continuity. Yes, that’s right. My next film, SETTLEMENT, was shot near the place where THE TRAIN STATION had been shot. It is filmed in a psychiatric dispensary. I knew films that had been made in similar places in the West –especially SAN CLEMENTE4 by Raymond Depardon –and I wanted to show how it looked in the East. The way mentally disabled people are treated in the East relates to a very different tradition, one might call it a Gulag tradition. At this time, I had started to work for the Saint Petersburg Documentary Studio, through which I made several films until 2008. I kept working for them, even though I was not living in the country anymore: at the very moment SETTLEMENT was presented at the Kar lovy Vary International Film Festival in 2001, I was on a bus heading towards Berlin with my things.
In BLOCKADE, each sound is carefully chosen for its potential of bringing in more than itself, but at the same time, the soundtrack as a whole had to be like music, it must convey a form of harmony. It was a lot of work at the time to achieve that. Now it is much easier, be cause Vladimir and I are getting used to this process, we have learned how to do it, and how to do it together. If I compare what we did then and what we did together for the latest archive editing film we made together, THE NATURAL HISTORY OF DESTRUCTION, I would call the soundtrack of the latter baroque, as opposed to the minimalist classicism of BLOCKADE’s soundtrack.
Among the films you made for the Saint Petersburg Docu mentary Studio, BLOCKADE has a specific place, since it was your first film based on pre-existing footage, and also because it attracted significantly more attention on your work. As is often the case, it all happened by chance. Since 2002, I had been working in an editing room in the Saint Petersburg Studio, and it happened that the man in the next room was working on film archives. We became friends and occasionally he would show me the footage he was working on and we would discuss it. Once, his door was open and I saw images on his monitor – with out sound – that he had been transferring to a new format for someone; he was checking the quality of the trans fer. I went in and stayed for three hours watching the footage. It has to be understood that, for decades in the USSR, every year there was at least one film dedicated to the siege of Leningrad during World War II. Almost all these films belonged to the average propaganda type, with the same discourse about the long suffering, the bravery of the resistance, and the final triumph. Every one who lived in the Soviet Union had seen these films many times since childhood. It was also something you learned how to deal with – not everyone, but many of us had learned to protect ourselves against such propa ganda. It was like growing a special skin against these images when you are young and then you know how to deal with them. But on that day in the Saint Petersburg Studio, watching that raw footage, without sound, with out music, I felt something different. I realised nobody had made a film about the people, about the city itself, during the blockade. For two years after that, I thought about this film , about how to give a different vision of what happened. It took me a long time but I knew early on how the film would finish: with the executions. This had never been shown, certainly not as the conclusion of a film on the topic – normally the films conclude with images of joy, of victory. Finally, the director of the stu dio, who knew I wanted to propose my own editing, told me to make the film for the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the war, in 2005. So, I did.
Though you had directed two short films before, is it right to consider THE TRAIN STATION in 2000 as your real starting point as a filmmaker? Yes, I agree. At that time, I was not analysing what I was doing, I was just following my intuition. So, with Pavel Kostomarov, a very good cameraman, I decided to go travelling through Russia, without any preconceived ideas. I was sure I would find some interesting situations that would deserve to be captured on film. Actually, I still think this is the best way to proceed for documentary: reality triggers the idea. And for that Russia was, and probably still is, an extraordinary field of research, due to its size and the variety of ways of living you can encoun ter. In Russia, people live in different times, physically and mentally – some live in the Middle Ages, some in the industrial era, some in the postmodern technological era. Anyway, Pavel and I were travelling by train. At one point, we stopped in a small town, about 100 kilometres from Saint Petersburg, to change trains. But the train we were waiting for was cancelled, so we were stuck there –and not even in a regular station, as it had burnt down and was in ruins. This was during winter, with a lot of snow all around, and we were there in the middle of nowhere when I saw people going to a building nearby. We went there, and it turned out to be one large room, brightly lit, with a lot of people, all of them asleep. The sound was a lot of snoring, you could hear the human breathing like a very material element. It was a kind of snoring and breathing symphony. Then a train passed by, a big one, the Moscow-Saint Petersburg express, very noisy, like thunder. Everything was shaking in the building. But no one woke up, they all kept sleeping and snoring. Noth ing happened. For me this train was like a materialisation of the revolution, a huge and brutal event that ultimate ly does not change much. So, I thought I could make a metaphorical film about what happened in the 1990s in Russia, in what was once the Soviet Union. But you did not shoot in the moment? No, that is not the kind of film I make. I did not even have a camera with me. I first had to think it over; later, with this idea in mind, I came back with Pavel and a camera. But I needed to decide which camera. First, I tried with a digital camera but it did not work well, so I decided to use film stock. Pavel built a special lens that would focus on the centre of the image but keep the edges out of focus. We did shoot the film, over the course of a whole year. I was concerned with the drama turgy of the film, I wanted to have the different seasons, to record the movement of time, and also reflect that through sound. It seems quite simple when you watch it, but it took a lot of work until it became the twenty-fourminute allegorical film THE TRAIN STATION. When the sound mix and all the post-production was over, I remember going back home and watching the result on a TV set, from a VHS tape, and thinking: “OK, this very bad, I got it all wrong.” But the film had been sent to some festivals, and DOK Leipzig invited me. There, I watched the film on a large cinema screen, and I have to say I really loved it. That is the moment I became cer tain that making films was to be my profession.
How was the film received in Russia? Before being shown, since it was for an official occasion, it had to be approved by a special commission, whose members watched the film at the end of 2004. For weeks, they would not give an answer. So, I sent the film to the International Film Festival Rotterdam, where it was very well received. Then, finally, the Minister of Culture ap proved it. When I showed BLOCKADE to my colleagues in Moscow at Domkino [House of cinema], some of them told me I was not allowed to show these things, to finish a film like that – even the young ones, which surprised and frightened me. But others said, in private, that they were grateful I had made the film this way. I soon discovered that the reactions to this film were very telling about the state of the society, about what different groups of people had in mind. Some films have the capacity to work as in dicators of the Zeitgeist. It happened again, for instance, with STATE FUNERALS, the film I made in 2019 that, quite unpredictably, was released in Russia. But it turned out that many people, mostly the old people who watched it, reacted by saying that yes, Stalin was a great man. And they cried during the whole film.
Tribute to Sergei Loznitsa / 28th Sarajevo Film Festival | 7
8 | Tribute to Sergei Loznitsa / 28th Sarajevo Film Festival On the set of MR LANDSBERGIS, with Professor Vytautas Landsbergis, © ATOMS & VOID On the set of MR LANDSBERGIS, with Professor Vytautas Landsbergis and photographer Antanas Sutkus, © ATOMS & VOID
Tribute to Sergei Loznitsa / 28th Sarajevo Film Festival | 9 On the set of MR LANDSBERGIS, with Professor Vytautas Landsbergis, © ATOMS & VOID
10 | Tribute to Sergei Loznitsa / 28th Sarajevo Film Festival Making films based on existing footage has become a ma jor part of your work. When you made BLOCKADE, were you aware that you had found a form of work that particu larly suits you? No, at the time I thought I would never do it again. But pretty soon after, I started to work on another archive film. It happened that I had seen a lot of film footage for Soviet information magazines of the late 1950s and early 60s. I was surprised to discover that a lot of it was actually of very good quality. First, a lot of the footage was filmed by very talented cameramen. As well, you could sense a certain feeling of freedom, characteristic of this era known as the thaw period in the USSR. I could see that the directors of these propaganda maga zines were exploring the potential of this (relative) ideological opening, for instance by giving the micro phone to people they met in the streets without hav ing pre-selected them. At the end of the Khrushchev era there was a brief moment of real freedom before the Stalinist backlash with the arrival of Brezhnev at the head of the country. So I made REVUE in 2008 to tell this forgotten story, but also with the idea of using propaganda footage in a non-propagandistic way – as an attempt to make the viewers aware of how the poi son of propaganda works. We know only too well that it still works nowadays. For me, it was an experiment: is it possible to change the meaning of this footage, and to extract a new meaning of images that came from so many different directors and cameramen, and were de signed for another purpose? Then your next archive film, in 2015, THE EVENT, was made up of much more recent images, shot in Leningrad during the uprising, in Moscow and other large cities all over Russia, against the coup in 1991. These were absolutely unique archival images, because everywhere in the Soviet Union the use of cameras, and of film stock, was strictly controlled. But for some rea son that was not the case in Leningrad at that moment, so what happened was recorded, with about two hours of footage. I decided to make a film out of it after I had made MAIDAN the previous year. For me they work together: MAIDAN is about a real popular uprising, the opposite of THE EVENT, which describes a situation that was actually staged by the authorities, even if the people in the streets were sincere. But most of them were mostly curious and anxious about was happening, the faces are completely different from those you see in MAIDAN. The films work together for me.
There is a third film you made, after MAIDAN and THE EVENT, about recent uprisings and civilians fighting armed forces in the streets, MR LANDSBERGIS, with amazing images of how Lithuania achieved its independ ence after resisting Russian military aggression. But this time, the focus is not so much on the people at large, as in the previous films, than it is on one man in particular, who gives his name to the film. This film exists thanks to Vytautas Landsbergis, in many respects. He is a remarkable person who has al ways fought for truth and freedom. I remember that, in 1989, he was the first to mention at the Parliament the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, a subject that was taboo at the time. Since that time, I have followed his articles and speeches – he also wrote essays about cinema. He already was one of the very few really smart politicians in the Soviet era, if only Russia had a few other, similar people, maybe the situation now would be different. And, of course, he played a decisive part in the path to independence for his country. In 2017, we met in Vilnius and became friends. I always wondered: Why has no one among the Lithuanian directors made a film about this unique character, who is also an excellent storyteller? So, when COVID arrived, my other pro jects were put on hold, I could not shoot what I had planned to, so I decided to go searching in the Lithu anian archives, and Landsbergis agreed to be filmed for a very long interview. With these two sets of visual elements, I worked for a year and a half to find the structure of the film. It is very long, but we had about a thousanda hours of footage, as many people had filmed the events in Vilnius with personal video cam eras. I had a lot of material to deal with, and I was also trapped in a contradiction, because all my documenta ries and archive films have no commentary, which is a major element of the cinema I want to make. But here, I had Landsbergis’s words, which related to the im ages, so I had to find new solutions. It was interesting for me on that level too. I also had to find another posi tion for myself – for the first time, I had been acting as the interviewer but I did not want to appear in the film, I did not want to take the space of a journalist. So, there were a lot of solutions that had to be found.
Would you say it is a pleasure for you, working with archi val material? As a viewer, I can sense a sort of joy explor ing the expressive potential of the editing process the way you use it. You are right – there are so many things to bring to light, elements that are already there but that remain unseen. For instance, I found an incredible archive from the 1990s, shot in Leningrad, about the way they saw the development of Russian capitalism. The fore sight of the country’s development as it was expected at the time is amazing, as opposed to what really hap pened. I am thinking of making a feature-length film with this material. Another one I want to make is about the first months of the invasion of the Soviet Union by German troops in June 1941 under the code name Barbarossa. What happened during these months, when the situation was totally unpredictable, is almost totally unseen, erased from memory. But, it is very meaningful, including in relation to what is happen ing now, with the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian army. I already know the image to finish the film, when the whole landscape is covered with snow: this is when Barbarossa has failed. But until that November, no one could have predicted what would happen.
THE EVENT and MR. LANDSBERGIS, and of course BLOCKADE and REVIEW, are dealing with a time gap between the period the film is about and the moment you make it, as opposed to MAIDAN, which was shot on the spot by you and the cameraman you work with. In this case you might have been in the position of a journalist, but ultimately this is not what the film conveys, it offers a different relationship to what happened, a cinematic rela tion with these events. When I started filming the events on Maidan Square, I did not know what I would do with the images, I just wanted to record what was going on. I wanted to keep traces of every spot where important things were hap pening, barricades of course, the city hall, the stage where people were making speeches, and were also singing and praying, the places where they cooked, where they took care of the wounded, etc. I wanted to document all the daily activities on Maidan, and the people who were there. Their faces. All kinds of people – young, old, housewives, priests, militants, poets, old ladies, students, everybody but the politicians. I tried to do that in the most objective possible way, even if “objective” should always be in quotation marks, so I chose to have a fixed camera on a tripod, with either wide shots or close-ups. For each place I intended to film, I tried to find a unique point of view, and decided not to edit these shots: as long as we see this or that situ ation, this or that person, we stay with them, without mixing them with other elements. During the violent street fights, it was sometimes difficult to have only one shot, but I did stick to this principle as much as I could. My goal was to avoid the accusation of propaganda. Somehow, this way of shooting was a way to push my principle of no comment to a new level, because editing can easily become also a kind of commentary. So, I shot during two weeks in December 2013 – at that point, I knew already that I had enough material to make a film, but the situation was not over. Since I had to leave for some other work abroad, I asked a very good Ukrain ian cameraman, Serkhiy Stetsenko, to go to Maidan and shoot more footage. When I left, I was still hoping that extreme violence could be avoided but finally that was not the case, and there were a lot of people killed or se verely wounded, and he had to film that. Finally, I made a film out of all this, in two parts. The first is about de picting the situation composed as the continuity of one day, from night to night; the second is about the battle. Were you aware of the structure the film would take when you started editing, or do you find its shape during the process?Mostof what I decide in the editing room is not precon ceived. I follow what the images ask for, and what the sequences I have already edited ask for. The decisions I make also depend on the requirements of dramaturgy. Cinematic storytelling has its own rules. The final ed iting is the moment when what cinema demands and what reality demands meet. This is what I have to find my way to during the editing process. Among other decisions, for MAIDAN I choose not to use the most violent images, those of the people killed by the police and the secret service men. That would have destroyed the general balance of the whole film. Just before making MAIDAN, you directed another film, which also relates to a fight in a city – a film that is espe cially dear to me – REFLECTION6, which is about the siege of Sarajevo. It provides another cinematic answer regarding the interrelation of present and past, through the reflection of moments in 2013 in photos taken during the siege. Do you see a connection between MAIDAN and REFLECTION?Ineverthought of that, but you may be right. As of ten, for REFLECTION I had no plan in advance, I just followed my intuition. I had never been to Sarajevo before; I went there and I drove to the famous bridge were the Archduke was killed. I walked on the bridge and right there I met the only person I knew in town, the great Bosnian director Danis Tanović. He was as surprised as I was. I told him why I was there, and he invited for dinner – but first he strongly recommended that I visit an exhibition of the photographer Milomir Kovačević. So, I discovered these photos made during the siege, these portraits of those who fought to pro tect Sarajevo. When I went there, it was the opening of the exhibition, and all those who had been portrayed in the early 1990s were there, twenty years later. So, with my photo camera, I tried to capture the reflection of the person standing next to me in their own portraits as warriors. At this moment, I got my idea for the film.
Extending from this initial idea inside the exhibition, I decided to shoot views of contemporary Sarajevo, quiet and warm in summer, with tourists, reflected on these photos from a time of extreme violence and fear.
Tribute to Sergei Loznitsa / 28th Sarajevo Film Festival | 11 REFLECTIONS (2014) Sergei Loznitsa during shooting of REFLECTIONS, photo by Milomir Kovačević
This is one of the many ways you have been able to ad dress relations between past and present through cinematic means. I find it very interesting that in the same images you had war and peace, past and present, photo and film. Through this apparatus, I could catch this opportunity. I am happy with that. Talking about time, I was always disturbed by the com ments on one of your films, AUSTERLITZ, which shows tourists in the Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen concentration camp. These comments often say that you are making fun of the tourists, showing their casual and disrespectful be haviour in this place of suffering and death. But I do not think this is what you do. To do that, you needed only ten or fifteen minutes. But the film is more than an hour-and-ahalf long, and is composed of very long shots. They create a much more complex and questioning relation to what we are watching. Absolutely. This film is about how we present tragic historical facts, and how people, I mean all of us, relate with them. It is not so much about the visitors, the film is more about the language of these presentations that deal with horror and death. In Europe, religion has lost most of its power and we have had to invent other lan guages. Traditionally, religions, priests, churches were instruments to help humans relate to these issues, but here it is not effective anymore. We lost our connec tion with death. There is a strong contrast between our state of mind, our ways to relate to suffering and death, and those that exist in more traditional societies, for instance in India. I remember visiting a temple dedi cated to Kali, the goddess of Death, in Kolkata – a place where you physically feel the relation to death, you be come ill, you walk barefoot on earth drenched in blood. The relation to death is a physical as well as a spiritual experience, an experience that also includes prayer and song. In the concentration camp, which is full of the physical remains and memories of the many people who were killed there, how can it be made sensible to visitors? The way people I filmed are dressed, the way they behave, should help us question how we represent these tragedies. The behaviour of these tourists, includ ing with what we judge as misconduct, is a symptom of something that concerns us all. And it’s not only about past horrors, those for which we build these memorials and keep saying, “Never again! Never again!” We can see now in Ukraine, as we have also seen elsewhere in recent decades, that these mass murders are happen ing again. And one should have in mind that all these crimes are not only committed by armies and police or thugs but also by ordinary people, pogroms, lynchings, looting… We are not changing as much as we believe. Barbarians are still around. I think memorials like the one in AUSTERLITZ are the right places to think about that. And your choices as director, the way you film, and par ticularly your use of duration, the length of shots and the length of the film itself, are tools to discuss and criticise the memorial apparatus. Yes, that’s it. MAIDAN (2014)
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14 | Tribute to Sergei Loznitsa / 28th Sarajevo Film Festival MY JOY (2010) MY JOY (2010)
I love actors – not all directors do. I get along very well with them; I understand how they feel and they under stand what I am looking for. For all my fiction films, I had the opportunity to work with a wonderful director of photography, the Romanian Oleg Mutu. We have a lot of discussions, I have ideas about how to shoot a given shot, he has ideas, the discussion between us is always interesting and fruitful. It’s not technical, it’s philosophical: how do we begin this sequence and why, what is the meaning of the way it develops, etc. And how would compare your way of working for docu mentary and fiction during the editing process?
And IN THE FOG, which tells the story of a man under deadly suspicion by both sides during the partisan resist ance in Belarus during World War II clearly refers to these notions. How did you succeed in making such an ambi tious film possible? With Heino Deckert, we began to build a rather com plex co-production to make the film possible, with money from Germany, Latvia, Netherlands, and Rus sia… And also Belarus: Vasil Bykov was born in Bela rus and, although he had become a fierce opponent of the government, the Ministry of Culture agreed to put some money in it. Bykov is a famous name there. Later the minister, Pavel Latushko, became an opponent of Lukachenko and his regime; after the uprising against the stolen election in 2020, he emigrated to Poland where he is very active in the counter-government. He is now being sued by the regime for putting money into my film – among many other things.
I guess you are referring to what happened when you were attacked by a Ukrainian cinema organisation after you re fused to condemn and exclude all of Russian culture or the independent Russian contemporary artists simply on the basis that they are Russian. Yes. These organisations are under the control of peo ple who have no notion of culture or democracy. My mistake was to have been part of it, because they in vited me when the Ukraine Film Academy was cre ated in 2017. I do not actually want to be part of any structure, but at one point, due to the situation after the democratic insurgency in Ukraine and the Russian ag gression in 2014, I felt I should accept this invitation to support what the country stood for. I already disa greed when they wanted to exclude all Ukrainian films in the Russian language from submission to the Oscars. They did it in 2018, but then when Volodymyr Zelensky came to power he cancelled this absurd rule. But I don’t have a connection with those who are now managing the Ukraine Film Academy; to my view they violently overreact at one moment and then they want to forget everything the next.
The big change when I started to direct fiction films is that I stopped editing alone. Until 2010, I was the only editor of all my films. Then, for MY JOY, I started to work with Danieilus Kokanauskis, from Lithuania. I love editing – it is a major moment of creation – but I felt I could use a partner in creativity, so he has been working with me on editing ever since. Of course, I am very much involved too at this stage, we edit together and he is growing with me (laughs). We get along very well – it is very productive.
Would you say that you think or behave differently while shooting a documentary as opposed to a fiction film? Basically, it is the same. The only difference is that the narrative films require much more organisation. In that case, I work with a hundred people, whereas when I am making a documentary, most of the time there are only four of us during the shooting: the cameraperson, the sound engineer, my assistant, and myself. Of course, the other major difference is about working with actors.
This behaviour evokes the thinking of the anthropologist and philosopher René Girard7, to which you have often referred, especially his interpretation of the figure of the scapegoat and how societies build themselves on it. I would single out three works by René Girard that, in my opinion, are important: THE LIES OF ROMANTI CISM and the TRUTH OF THE NOVEL, VIOLENCE AND THE SACRED, and THE SCAPEGOAT. In these writings, we can find clues to the fundamental conflicts that shake human communities. And in this sense, we have a common topic for research. I’m trying to do this using the language of cinema.
Generally speaking, at least for fiction films, would you say the most important moment is the shooting or the editing? For me, the most important elements happen during the preparation. For a fiction film, I spend three or four months on preparation, everything is carefully designed, all the major decisions are made then. We rehearse with the camera, the set designer, Kirill Chou valov, from Russia, storyboards the whole film. That doesn’t mean I will follow those storyboards exactly, but it is a very solid base. So, when we shoot, for the most part we only have to solve technical questions. MY JOY, which seems somehow freewheeling, at times improvised, was done that way – it was completely pre pared, everything was written. And this was also the case for the three other fiction films I have made so far, and for the next one I am working on. Maybe I will publish all these storyboards some day – I believe they might have some value on their own. Even if it is very clear that you are personally active and in control of every aspect of the making of each of your films, we are also speaking of a very collective process, where many people are closely involved. One crucial dimension in the process of making a film, whatever its type or its length, is that I choose the peo ple I work with very carefully. As things went on dur ing the last decade or so, it turned out that I could find creative partners from many different nations, almost from all over Europe. On my sets, you can hear eight or ten different languages. I LOVE that! Some might think that could make the collaboration among all of us difficult, due to different languages and backgrounds, but this is not the case. Why? I believe it is easy for us to work all together because I know clearly the re sult I want. I know the concept, the basic idea, and I know how to make it clear to everyone. From this start ing point, everyone can offer their input, and I enjoy it when someone comes up with a better proposition than mine in the way we can reach our common goal. Op posite to what one might expect, the whole thing goes always quite fast – after three months of preparation, I need a maximum of two months for shooting, two months for editing, and two more months to complete post-production, sound design, etc. So, for me, nine months is the average amount of time I need to make a feature film, because the idea at the start is clear. This is the most important thing for me.
Previously, you have said that in making documentaries, one has to follow the rules of dramaturgy. Would you say that is the same for fiction? Are the rules the same? Yes, they are basically the same rules, but of course the way to comply with these rules has to be determined sep arately in each case, and the answers are never the same. One decisive aspect is to understand your own limits, and to act accordingly. Even more important is what you exclude, what you decide not to show, not to tell. This is what leaves some space for viewers to interact with your film. By not telling or showing every element of the story, you invite their imagination to be active, creative.
When and why did you create your own production com pany, Atoms and Void? It was in 2013. When the events of Euromaidan began on Maidan Square, if I wanted to make a film about them it was not going to be possible to go on the usual quest to find producers, to apply for money from broad casters or other institutions. I had to respond immedi ately, so my wife, Maria Choustova, created this com pany, and we produced MAIDAN without any financial backing. Then the Netherlands Film Fund gave us some money for the post-production, and the French distribu
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After ten years as a documentary filmmaker, you directed your first fiction film, MY JOY, in 2010. What made you take this turn? It was not a turn. I always had the idea of directing fic tion films – I studied in film school to be a fiction film director. Actually, I had directed a fiction film, my only one for a long time, which was also my only film made at school, TODAY WE BUILD A HOUSE, in 1996 –for which I had to pay for everything. But during the 1990s and even during the early 2000s, the Russian film industry was in such jeopardy that it was really difficult to make a first narrative film. As early as 2001, I wrote a script fpr what I wanted to be my first feature, based on a novel by the famous Soviet writer Vasil Bykov, IN THE FOG. Bykov supported the project, but it was not possible to find a producer. And even if, in the follow ing years, I became a rather successful documentary filmmaker, fiction cinema was another universe, the separation was real – it is still there now. Finally, I met Oleg Kokhan, a Ukrainian producer, who had been Kira Muratova’s producer. He proposed producing a feature I would direct, saying he could find at least a portion of the money. I had worked previously with the Ger man producer Heino Deckert, he was a co-producer of REVUE, and he agreed to come on board, but it was not enough to make a period film set during World War II with a large cast of characters. As well, the producers said there were already a lot of films about this period so it was useless – which is obviously wrong, there is still a lot to do and to learn, as we can unfortunately see now. So, I wrote a new script, based on several situ ations I had lived or witnessed, or was told about by those who experienced them. It was really like a note book of my impressions after many years of travelling in the Russian countryside. Was the shift to fiction difficult? Did you encounter unex pected difficulties? I did not have artistic or creative problems during the making of MY JOY, only financial problems. The film was very difficult to shoot because of the lack of money and the unpredictability of its arrival. Every week I was not sure it would be possible to keep going. But, finally, we did it and, to my total surprise, it was invited to the Official Selection at Cannes. Then my career as a fea ture director was launched. And then you were able to move immediately to making your second fiction film, IN THE FOG Yes, at this moment Heino Deckert, asked what I wanted to do next and what I wanted to do was IN THE FOG This time, I managed to convince him that it was still meaningful to make a film about World War II, especially about this topic, when someone becomes the scapegoat of a community, which is a very frequent occurrence – this is actually what is happening to me now, to a certain extent.
One striking aspect of this film is that sometimes the view ers do not know which side the people on the screen are on – for instance, the factory workers who build bombs in Germany and in England look exactly the same. This is exactly my point – the film is about the destruc tion process itself. But it also raaises the question of
In each case, your works on historical events, some of which took place in the quite distant past, resonate with contempo rary situations. You initiated your most recent film, NATU RAL HISTORY OF DESTRUCTION, about the massive Allied bombing of the German population at the end of World War II, before the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine began in March 2022. But when we discovered the film at Cannes in May of the same year, it strongly resonated with what was happening at the same moment. In terms of warfare, the bombings and destruction of cities in Ukraine are the direct follow up of what devel oped during the twentieth century. The massive buildup of weapons of mass destruction, artillery, even more bomber planes (and now missiles) implies the concept of total war, the destruction of entire cities. This is what we have seen everywhere, and it involves any army that obtains this kind of arsenal. As soon as they have the weapons that enable them to destroy civilian popula tions in a mass way, they will do it. This what W. G. Sebald showed so clearly in his book, whose title I used for my film about the useless destruction of the Ger man cities by the British and American Air Forces. Of course, the German army had also used this tactic, and the Russians too. And this is what is going on now in Ukraine. There is an historical continuity. Even if I had not anticipated what has been happening since March in Ukraine, the editing of archives from World War II makes sense today. It is, unfortunately, very clear. It is clear now, but that was not the case earlier. I started to work on this project in 2017. It is an expensive project due to the cost of using the archival material, so I applied for funding – but most institutions replied saying there is no need to make such a film, that everything has been said and shown, that these events belong to the past.
16 | Tribute to Sergei Loznitsa / 28th Sarajevo Film Festival tor ARP bought the rights, which covered what we had spent of our own money. That was it. Since then, having my own production company has given me the freedom to work, especially on films that use edited archival ma terial, for which it is almost impossible to show a script in advance. I began to apply for these projects with At oms and Void, and the first response I got was from the Hubert Bals Fund in Rotterdam. All my documentaries are produced or co-produced by Atoms and Void.
The company is also attached to your fiction films. Yes, but for the fiction films we act only as a co-producer –producing would demand too much of the energy I need for the creative process. Each film demands such a level of concentration, you have to deal with so many heterogene ous topics that you really need to focus on what is most important. And each time, after I finish a film, I need to clean my brain, which is something I do through reading. But I do not read detective stories or pulp fiction, more likely books about new theories in astrophysics and other scientific research. This is the best recreation for me.
Your third fiction film, A GENTLE CREATURE, made in 2017, was quite surprising, in that its style was quite dif ferent from what you had done before. Especially the ele ments of the grotesque, which do not fit in with what we knew of your aesthetic. For me there is no big change. I had this story in mind for eight years before I made the film, loosely based on Dostoevsky’s short story of the same title, and I always knew the style of the film I wanted. Actually, this style is not as new as you say – there were some elements of grotesque in MY JOY, with the character of the crazy poet. WITH A GENTLE CREATURE, I was looking for ways to describe the world I have observed during most of my life, which should be called the Russian Empire, through different times and forms. And what you call grotesque seemed appropriate, at least at some moments – the film is not the same in its tone all the way through. This extreme, ugly – and at the same time ridiculous – violence of behaviour will be everywhere again in DONBASS, my fourth fiction film, but at this moment it will be based on real situations. I believe what I show in A GENTLE CREATURE is a pretty accurate way of describing a totalitarian society, and more specifically the Russian one. The grotesque is ac tually already present in some of Dostoevsky’s works, like DEMONS – there is this mix of tragedy and clus terfuck that is very typical of Russian society. But my main reference here was the work of the great philolo gist Mikhail Bakhtin, who wrote a major book about François Rabelais. The book is of course about the car nivalesque and the grotesque in the work of the French Renaissance writer, but also about the Soviet world in which Bakhtin himself lived. And it is not only about Stalin and the Stalinist era but also about Russia in general; Stalin just concentrates trends that are part of the dark side of Russia – which, of course, also has its bright and beautiful sides. It is these dark sides that Pu tin now embodies. Bakhtin is someone important to me in many respects, with reference to Dostoevsky novels, he created the notion of chronotope, connecting time and space. Time and space as one entity: this is cinema!
DONBASS is your fourth fiction feature film, and it works with a very original concept – it is based on the re-en actment of existing videos shot in the occupied part of Ukraine after the 2014 Russian invasion. Why did you feel the need to re-stage these situations instead of just show ing what happened? Since my beginnings as a filmmaker, I have been think ing of a specific operation: using existing documentary footage and mixing it with fiction sequences I would shoot, in order to make a single filmic object in which you cannot tell the difference between the documentary and fiction elements. This is what my next film will be it examines what happened in Babi Yar, this place in Ukraine where more than thirty thousand Jews were killed by the Nazis in 1941. For the last ten years, I have been trying to make the film… it is on its way. Making DONBASS was a step in this long-term research. I rec reated sequences I found on YouTube, videos shot by unknown persons showing various moments in the oc cupied territories of Ukraine. In doing the re-creations, I learned a lot about the relation between truth and dramaturgy. For each scene, I had to think about what can and should be done to organise the events we are watching, to change (or not) the timing, to decide the position of the camera, etc. Each decision aims to re mains true to what really happened but at the same time seeks to increase the dramatic quality of the film, and to pique the interest of the viewer. One of the main drama turgic elements in reorganising as well as re-enacting deals with how a scene ends. In real life, there may be no end, or the end may come long after the moment in question; here, it needs to find some kind of conclusion that brings a meaning to the episode. We live in a time of fake news, when many people make up false stories and pretend these so-called alternative realities are true. Do you think it is perhaps dangerous to dissolve the limit between what was recorded and what was created? There is immense risk in allowing the possibility of generat ing belief in false representations of what really happens. Research is dangerous, you need to take risks to reach something new. I see myself as a scientist using cin ema tools for my research and it is the nature of what I am that takes me to explore these uncharted territories. Cloning sheep was dangerous, it raised a lot of ethical questions – but this is what researchers are meant to do. And I am convinced that what I do is not only interest ing; it is necessary. When people watch archival foot age, they have a certain state of mind, because they are aware the events that are portrayed actually happened. When they watch fiction, they are in another state of mind – they know it is made up. This knowledge pro vides protection against the depth of emotion I want to share with spectators. Mixing archival and fiction elements is a way to achieve that. Otherwise, people maintain a distance from the most brutal events. The fiction project about Babi Yar is intended to generate a strong emotional impression, beyond the intellectual knowledge of the event. I want viewers to get a no tion of what it really meant to be a Jew in that moment. And it is not only morally meaningful, it can be also practical and useful in real life. For instance, now in Ukraine, a lot of people experience horrors they are not at all prepared for. They do not understand what is hap pening to them, though it has happened before, and in this case in the very same places. These people, like all of us, have seen horrible things on TV about tragedies happening elsewhere, they have seen horrible things in stories they know to be fiction. In both cases, they can remain distant. I want everyone to learn in their flesh that it is possible, it is possible again, today and tomor row, and it is possible these things can happen to you, to every one of us, to ourselves. So, what you intend to create is in a sense an educational project. Yes! Yes – but not like learning from books, it has to be an emotional educative process. I believe this technique can change, at least a little, individual and collective per ceptions, it can change people. Even if it is just a bit, it’s worthwhile. At least, this is what I try to do. Since I made DONBASS, I often taught master classes in which I showed both original material and what I did with of it, to compare and to discuss. Sometimes the answer is that the original was better, sometimes not – in many cases, people have different opinions, which is great. It totally matches my scientific interest in cinema. And this is also the reason I want to make the fiction film about Babi Yar. I will use the archives that were filmed in 1941, some of which I used in my film BABI YAR: CONTEXT, but combined with sequences I will shoot with actors, with the same appearance, the same texture. This means that you think what you have already done with your film we saw at Cannes in 2021, BABI YAR: CONTEXT, made up entirely of pre-existing footage, is not enough? No. It is not enough because it only shows the events from a distance, before and after, but not what really hap pened. I want to show how decisions were made, and how they were executed, mainly on the German side. There are a lot of reports, of memoirs, of testimonies, of tran scripts of interrogations during trials, so the factual ele ments exist. The officers of the Einzatsgruppen, the Nazi death squads, were highly educated people, they wrote a lot and with great precision. I want to understand, and make understood, what kinds of discipline, what kinds of vocabulary, what kinds of philosophy, etc., are used while committing such crimes. It is an anthropological inquiry, if you wish. But to really access it, it needs to be performed. Written documents are not enough.
Tribute to Sergei Loznitsa / 28th Sarajevo Film Festival | 17 IN THE FOG (2012) A GENTLE CREATURE (2017)
18 | Tribute to Sergei Loznitsa / 28th Sarajevo Film Festival BABI YAR. CONTEXT (2021)
responsibility. To a certain extent, everyone is involved in what is done during wartime today. It is very different to the way things were in the pre-industrial era, when only ar mies were involved in combat. Now, to a certain extent, all Russians who are not opponents of Putin’s regime are his accomplices, even if only because they pay the taxes that pay to make of weapons, or because they work for logis tics, for infrastructure, for transportation. An aspect I only thought about after finishing the film and watching it is that you see all the efforts of the European people to build a very sophisticated civilisation, that translates in particular into all these wonderful cities, and buildings, and admirable constructions – but they also build the tools to destroy all of that. And they did! And they might very well do what is hap pening in Ukraine again, elsewhere. As if there were a gen eral law of destruction and self-destruction, a law that works beyond people’s will. Like a physical law, a natural law. The film describes the way this law has effects. It is quite simi lar to the process Albert Camus described in his novel The Plague. It seems to come from nowhere, and contaminates everyone, everywhere. This is what is happening now.
1) THE KINDELY ONES, originally published in French, is an epic novel based by the American born writer Jonathan Litell, which tells the fictional memories of a SS officer having been directly involved in the Nazi mass crimes on the Eastern Front and in the extermination camps.
2) Naum Kleiman is an eminent film historian, who created and ran the Eisenstein Cabinet, which became the meeting point of all the cinema lovers who came to Moscow since the end of the 1960s. At the beginning of the 1990s, Kleiman coordinated and became the director of the Museum of Cin ema, until he was expelled under the pressure of Putin affiliated bureaucrats and their strong man in the cinema field, the “Czar” Nikita Mikhalkov.
3) Kira Muratova (1934–2018) directed sixteen feature-length narrative films between 1961 and 2012, often in conflict with Soviet authorities. She worked most of the time with the Studio of Odessa, the Ukrainian city where she spent most of her life.
Tribute to Sergei Loznitsa / 28th Sarajevo Film Festival | 19
Jean-Michel FRODON is a journalist and film critic, who wrote for daily “Le Monde” (1990-2003), was the editorial director of “Cahiers du cinema” (2003-2009), now regu larly writes for Slate.fr and many journals and magazines, both in print and online, in France, but also USA, South Korea, Spain and the Balkans. He is also professor at Sci ences Po Paris (Political Sciences Institute) and Honorary Professor at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. As a cinema historian, he is the author or editor of many books, including La Projection nationale, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Con versation avec Woody Allen, Le Cinéma chinois, Cinema and the Shoah, Robert Bresson, Gilles Deleuze et les imag es, La Critique de cinéma, Amos Gitai Genèses, Le Cinéma d’Edward Yang, Le Cinéma français de la Nouvelle Vague à nos jours, Assayas par Assayas, Cinemas of Paris, The World of Jia Zhangke, Chris Marker, 13xOzu, Abbas Kia rostami l’œuvre ouverte, Le Cinéma à l’épreuve du divers. He also acts as a programmer and a curator in festivals and exhibitions (Centre Pompidou, Cinémathèque française, ZKM, Taipei Biennal, Centre Pompidou Metz, LUMA).
4) SAN CLEMENTE is a documentary directed by Raymond Depardon and Sophie Ristelhueber, shot in 1982 in a psychiatric asylum on the island near Venice that gives the film its name.
5) STATE FUNERAL is a 2 hours 15 editing of archival footage about the collective mourning through out USSR and the official ceremony after the death of Stalin.
6) REFLECTION is Sergei Loznitsa’s short film for the omnibus film BRIDGES OF SARAJEVO (2014), which brought together thirteen European filmmakers under the artistic direction of Jean-Michel Frodon.
7) René Girard (1923–2015) was a French anthropologist and philosopher who taught in US universities. He developed a vast theoretical interpretation of the social life, based on historical, mythological, and religious research, and structured around the key concept of “mimetic desire.” The three books Loznitsa refers to were originally published in 1961, 1972, and 1982.
