Sabzian and Bozar are pleased to welcome the Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa to Brussels for the State of Cinema 2024. For seven years now, Sabzian – which celebrates its tenth anniversary in 2024! – has asked a guest to write a State of Cinema article, a text that holds cinema up to the light, an invitation to reflect on what cinema means, could mean, or should mean today.
Sergei Loznitsa (b. 1964) grew up in Kiev and studied at the famous film school VGIK in Moscow. In recent decades he has made more than twenty documentaries and feature films. In his documentary work, which is rooted in the rich tradition of avant-garde documentary that is so central to the history of Soviet cinema, he captures, without commentary and with a keen eye and careful editing, a Russia in transition. His films offer us, despite the variations in form, portraits of history, whether through everyday observations (a quiet rural village in Life Autumn [1999] or sleeping and waiting train passengers in a station in The Halt [2000]), through the editing of found footage (the Siege of Leningrad in Blockade [2005], the infamous Moscow show trials in The Trial [2018], or Stalin's state funeral in State Funeral [2019]), or through documenting contemporary events (the Ukrainian civil uprising against President Yanukovych’s regime in Maidan (2014) and more recently the fight against the Russian invasion in The Invasion [2024]). In 2010, Loznitsa directed his first feature film, My Joy, a dark road movie in which the seemingly random encounters of a hapless truck driver reveal the sharp contradictions that define twenty-first-century Russia. His feature debut premiered in the official Cannes competition. In the following years, In the Fog (2012), A Gentle Creature (2017), and Donbass (2018) would follow, all three presented at Cannes. Loznitsa’s oeuvre is both poetic and political, disturbing and meditative, in direct contact with the vicissitudes of history, both large and small.
Loznitsa will read his text in the Henry Le Boeuf Hall, followed by a conversation about his artistic practice and the screening of a film selected by him. More information about the chosen film and the program will follow.
Photo: Sergei Loznitsa, © ATOMS & VOID