Loznitsa expertly puts footage together from Leningrad in August 1991 as tens of thousands of nervous Russians filled the streets, with the political fate of their country hanging in the balance after communist hardliners staged what would become a failed coup d’état to revive the collapsing Soviet Union.
Despite the lack of narration to contextualise the historical footage, Loznitsa’s approach of letting the picture paint a thousand words convincingly shows us the abject reality of millions of Russians who suffered greatly during the devastating Leningrad blockade of WWII.
An extraordinary work of hard-hitting social realism that recalls the Dardennes’ ‘Rosetta’ and Mungiu’s ‘4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days’, set in the harsh wintry conditions of Moscow as a young Kyrgyz woman abandons her baby to find work to pay off insurmountable debts.
It gets dull after a while, but the context—a Soviet fabricated show trial ordered by Stalin to frame and prosecute ‘anti-communists’ in the eyes of the public—is still an eye-opening look at character assassination on a national, ideological level, nearly a century ago.
Edited entirely from restored archival footage of Stalin’s state funeral, this is a cinema of profound sadness and a towering achievement from one of the great screen chroniclers of Soviet history.
There is probably no other purgatorial cinematic experience like this—a Pasolini-meets-Tarkovsky medieval sci-fi epic that finds stark beauty in all of its carnivalesque filth and revolting excess.
Part of the massive if controversial ‘DAU’ project, this entry is backed by bold performances by its two actresses even if the film doesn’t quite achieve true power through provocation.
Eternality Tan 