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.
A rare narrative feature from one of the world’s foremost documentarians of Soviet history, this vignette-style dark absurdist satire doesn’t pull its punches from depicting the sorry state of affairs in Russian-occupied Eastern Ukraine.
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.
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.
Eternality Tan 