The films of Ukranian director Sergei Loznitsa (b. 1964) are rooted in the rich tradition of avant-garde documentary so central to the history of Soviet cinema. After graduating in 1997 from the intensely selective Russian State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow, Loznitsa directed a series of striking and celebrated short films as a member of the legendary St. Petersburg Documentary Film Studio. Free of any kind of voice over or explanatory devices, Loznitsa’s short documentaries are instead pure cinematic poems whose subtle arguments are made through careful montage and arresting imagery which captures both the quickening pulse of Russia in the midst of the profound political and socio-cultural transition, and the deeper echoing rhythms of history. The lyricism and lasting melancholy of Loznitsa’s early films define a different, subtler mode of political cinema perhaps best exemplified in The Train Stop, a haunting vision of a train station waiting room filled with passengers all deep in a strange and unbroken slumber, travelers on oneiric and unexplained voyages. In 2010 Loznitsa directed his first feature film, My Joy, a dark and brilliantly trenchant road movie in which the seeming random encounters of a hapless truck driver together reveal the sharpest contradictions and troubling continuities defining 21st century Russia. Loznitsa’s second feature, In the Fog turned back in time to the searing blood-soaked battlefield that was Ukraine during the Second World War. An angry and lucid examination of the blurred borders between collaboration and patriotism, In the Fog confirmed Loznitsa as an unflinching and keenly intelligent artist able to use narrative cinema to genuinely engage politics and history. His powerful new film Maidan turns to the urgent present moment of Ukraine, capturing the nation’s still unresolved struggle through a series of epic and symphonic portraits of the massive anti-government protests that swept the nation and the violent retribution that followed.

The Harvard Film Archive is honored to welcome Sergei Loznitsa to present and discuss Maidan and My Joy and gratefully thanks and acknowledges the Flaherty Seminar and Colgate University for their collaboration on this program.– Haden Guest

Sergei Loznitsa’s visit and films are shown in concert with Lives of the Great Patriotic War, an exhibition presented by the Harvard Library and the Blavatnik Archive Foundation focusing on Jewish participation in the Soviet Armed Forces during WWII (known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War). Featuring war-time diaries, letters, photographs and contemporary oral testimonies, the exhibitions brings to life a largely unknown chapter of Jewish history: the participation of 500,000 Soviet Jewish soldiers in the fight against German fascism.