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Pushkin House presents a screening of Donbass by Sergei Loznitsa as part of their comprehensive programme Witnessing History: Films by Sergei Loznitsa.
Documentary works by Sergei Loznitsa are always in the spotlight at international film festivals, but his occasional experiences in fiction films have become no less successful. The most recent of them, Donbass, won the Un Certain Regard award for Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival and many other prestigious awards.
The film dives into the history of a hybrid war that has been going on since 2014 in the Donbass region in eastern Ukraine, and has since evolved into a full-scale invasion. Along with open armed conflict, the war has involved, from the very beginning, killings and robberies on a mass scale perpetrated by separatist gangs. In the Donbass, war is called peace, propaganda is uttered as truth and hatred is declared to be love. A journey through the Donbass 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.
About Sergei Loznitsa
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.
Cast:
Tamara Yatsenko, Iryna Zayarmiuk, Hryhoriy Masliuk, Olesia Zhurakivska