![\"Sergei](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/260418-masterclass-Sergei_Loznitsa\u00a9Nikita_Thevoz_07_web-1620x1080-1.jpeg\")
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Sergei Loznitsa (right) during his masterclass at the Visions du R\u00e9el documentary festival that takes place every year in Nyon in western Switzerland. <\/p>\n
\u00a9Nikita Thevoz <\/p>\n
Sergei Loznitsa, one of the most acclaimed filmmakers of his generation, was recently subject of a retrospective at Visions du R\u00e9el, the major Swiss documentary festival. Born in Belarus and raised in Ukraine, Loznitsa is unrelenting in his reckoning with Russia\u2019s imperial power. So why is he highly controversial in Ukraine?\n<\/p>\n
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May 14, 2026 – 10:00\n<\/p>\n
Sergei Loznitsa is impossible to catch these days. Since his Gulag drama Two Prosecutors opened across Europe and the United States, the director is on a grand tour. New York\u2019s Metrograph External link<\/a>screened his documentaries on the Ukrainian conflict; the American CinemathequeExternal link<\/a> followed with an eclectic selection; and now Visions du R\u00e9el, which ended on April 26, curated a substantial retrospective, celebrating External link<\/a>his cinematic devotion to \u201cthe post-Soviet territory and memory through its upheavals and cycles of violence\u201d.<\/p>\n Loznitsa\u2019s documentaries carry the signature of a master chronicler of (post-)Soviet metamorphoses. His protagonist is the crowd, framed in wide compositions and vast landscapes that become a canvas to contemplate countless lives caught in trials, revolutions and wars. Uninterested in sentimentality or heroism, he studies humanity like a historian, an approach that was set in his early works. <\/p>\n Blockade (2006) distilled three-and-a-half hours\u00a0of archival footage of siege-starved Leningrad into an hour-long film. These very few hours of surviving footageExternal link<\/a> are part of the tragedy, for they do not do justice to the 900-day German siege during Second World War in which over half a million city residents died, most of them from starvation. With no commentary, the catastrophe speaks for itself. <\/p>\n External Content <\/p>\n Working across fiction, documentary and the elusive border between both genres, Loznitsa seems most at home in the editing room. State Funeral (2019), his monumental picture of the state farewell to Stalin, is his genuine masterpiece. The hypnotic spectacle teaches the viewer more about the Soviet \u201csoul\u201d, its rituals and state tyranny than any textbook could. <\/p>\n As endless processions of mourners outgrow the figure of Stalin, they form a portrait of the Soviet Union caught in the moment of its own mass transformation. The sound design of trusted collaborator Vladimir Golovnitsky lends a sensory charge to the mute footage, reconstructing voices, noises and music.<\/p>\n Archival mastery<\/p>\n Loznitsa\u2019s devotion to archives optimises their function: making the past speak of the present. The way the aerial footage of The Natural History of Destruction (2022) glides over bombarded German cities rhymes with current videos from Ukraine. <\/p>\n The Trial (2018), reassembled from propaganda footage of a 1930s tribunal, reads straight onto the lawlessness of Russian justice today. The Event (2015), built from footage of the August 1991 coup attempt in Leningrad, feels urgent as Russia retreats into the very authoritarianism that moment tried to end.<\/p>\n Against the backdrop of war, Western critics have elevated External link<\/a>Loznitsa to the leading voice of Ukrainian cinema, praising his unshakeable interrogation of Russian imperialism. The shorthand is flattering, but it skips over his ongoing conflict with the Ukrainian film industry, which does not quite share in the applause.<\/p>\n External Content <\/p>\n Having quit the European Film Academy over its weak response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Loznitsa was even more disturbed by their subsequent call to boycott Russian culture, which he denounced External link<\/a>as \u201cabsurd\u201d. Such rhetoric came as an unpleasant surprise to the Ukrainian Film Academy and served as grounds to expel him. \u201cNow, when Ukraine is struggling to defend its independence, the key concept in the rhetoric of every Ukrainian should be his national identity,\u201d its statement External link<\/a>read at the time.<\/p>\n \u201cUnfortunately, this is Nazism,\u201d Loznitsa wrote back External link<\/a>to the Ukrainian \u201cacademics\u201d (his quotation marks). He used the moment to answer accusations of cosmopolitanism levelled at him, equating the charge with a Stalinist mindset: the denial of dissent, the reliance on hatred, the betrayal of the European values Ukraine is striving for.<\/p>\n The zone of trauma<\/p>\n At the 2023 Jerusalem Film Festival, his partner and producer Maria Choustova told External link<\/a>Israeli newspaper Haaretz that Loznitsa\u2019s suspension stemmed \u201cpartly from jealousy and partly from hard-line rightist views\u201d. \u201cThese are people [the Ukrainian \u201cacademics\u201d] who are deeply traumatised,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Loznitsa himself has long lived outside that zone of war trauma. Born in Belarus and raised in Ukraine, his late 20s were spent in Moscow for film education, and since 2001 he commutes External link<\/a>between Berlin and Vilnius.<\/p>\n Ukrainian filmmaker Vitaly Mansky recently alluded External link<\/a>to Loznitsa in an interview. \u201cOne powerful director writes everywhere that he is a Ukrainian artist, though he doesn\u2019t live in Ukraine and doesn\u2019t even shoot his films there. If there were no war, I wouldn\u2019t pay attention. As it is, it\u2019s simply tactless.\u201d<\/p>\n Nonetheless, Loznitsa\u2019s trajectory is bound up with Ukraine\u2019s modern history, and for a while this alignment was mutually beneficial: he gained the cachet of a Ukrainian auteur while his films drew attention to the war.<\/p>\n \n More<\/p>\n More <\/p>\n Culture\n <\/p>\n Zurich honours Vitaly Mansky: documenting power, memory and the Russian Empire <\/p>\n This content was published on <\/p>\n Nov 5, 2025 <\/p>\n Zurich is showcasing a comprehensive retrospective of the work of Russian-Ukrainian filmmaker Vitaly Mansky. <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Read more: Zurich honours Vitaly Mansky: documenting power, memory and the Russian Empire Analysing Ukraine<\/p>\n When his chronicles explore fascist territory and Ukraine\u2019s recent history, the author\u2019s own voice emerges more explicitly. His uncompromising views on Ukrainian culture and identity provoke a dialogue that is essential but fatalistic in its habit of arriving at the wrong moment.<\/p>\n Stylistically, his documentaries drawn from current events differ little from the archival ones. Maidan (2014), a quintessential film about the Maidan Revolution (also known as the Revolution of Dignity), offers a comprehensive portrait of the upheaval at the heart of Kyiv. Here, the seemingly omniscient, distanced gaze on the protests also owes something to the fact External link<\/a>that Loznitsa shot only parts of the film himself, passing instructions to his cameraman for the rest.<\/p>\n External Content <\/p>\n Where Maidan\u2019s restraint was offset by the crowd\u2019s revolutionary spirit, follow-up The Invasion (2024) is even more austere. This time the director produced an observational documentary about the war without actually observing it himself. Working remotely, through the eyes of two cinematographers, what emerges is a mosaic portrait of grief and resistance across the country whose attempts at decolonisation are cast in tragic light.<\/p>\n In one scene a woman walks into a bookshop, asking where to place her Russian-language books. It turns out the shop pulps them \u2013 the conveyor belt to their death draws the film\u2019s tightest close-ups. For Loznitsa, this scene was painful to watch. \u201cIt\u2019s a pity people don\u2019t learn anything from these experiences,\u201d he concludedExternal link<\/a>.<\/p>\n Riskier notions about the danger of unlearned lessons surface in another major work, Babi Yar. Context (2021). Edited from footage of the Nazi massacre of Kyiv\u2019s Jews during the Second World War, the film presses on an unexamined fact in Ukrainian memory: the city\u2019s residents did not resist the mass shootings, and in places assisted them.<\/p>\n In Ukraine, though the film was praised for its formal excellence, it was also met External link<\/a>with unease for opening a fraught chapter of Ukrainian history without the careful contextual nuance it demanded. Loznitsa has pushed back on readings of the film as an indictment of present-day Ukraine, telling External link<\/a>the magazine Film Comment that the country is \u201cradically different\u201d today and \u201cnot yet dominated by the ideas of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists\u201d. The OUN is a far-right Ukrainian organisation.<\/p>\n The matter of distance<\/p>\n Sergei Loznitsa at the 71st Cannes Film Festival, where he won the Best Director award for \u2018Donbass\u2019 in the parallel section \u2018Un Certain Regard\u2019, May 2018. <\/p>\n Keystone-EPA\/Clemens Bilan <\/p>\n When Russian propaganda peddles tales of Ukrainian neo-Nazis, exhuming this theme onto the open wounds of war hardly makes for productive dialogue. Less so when, during peace negotiations, the Russians still demand the \u201cdenazification\u201d of Ukraine \u2013 which is seen by Ukrainians as a code for rejecting their country\u2019s sovereignty and heritage.<\/p>\n For Ukrainians, preserving that identity is an existential fight, both literal and metaphorical, and the directors do not have the luxury of making cinema for historical lessons or artistic pleasure. For them, the camera is a weapon, a record of war crimes and suffering.<\/p>\n The standoff around Loznitsa speaks not only to the practices and ethics of the war documentary, but also asks a broader question: where does Western support for Ukrainian resilience end, once the country\u2019s own decisions about its culture and identity become uncomfortable to watch?<\/p>\n Perhaps the one distance Loznitsa\u2019s filmography has never quite mastered is the ethical one \u2013 a matter of patience, and tactful empathy.<\/p>\n Despite repeated requests, Swissinfo was unable to arrange an interview with the Sergei Loznitsa.<\/p>\n Edited by Virginie Mangin & Eduardo Simantob\/ts<\/p>\n Articles in this story <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sergei Loznitsa (right) during his masterclass at the Visions du R\u00e9el documentary festival that takes place every year…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":65175,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[15555,101,98,10638,7923,7187,2669,460,3314,41,17,4140],"class_list":{"0":"post-65174","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-switzerland","8":"tag-armed-conflict","9":"tag-article","10":"tag-beat-culture","11":"tag-beat-swiss-cinema","12":"tag-cinema","13":"tag-film-festival","14":"tag-history","15":"tag-multi","16":"tag-production-type-external","17":"tag-swiss","18":"tag-switzerland","19":"tag-war"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ch\/116572202431011873","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65174"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65174\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65175"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Vitaly-Mansky-and-orchestra-of-the-hetman-P.-Sahaidachnyi-National-ground-forces-academy.jpg\")
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