Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa will be the special guest of the 57th edition of the international documentary film festival Visions du Réel, which will take place from April 17 to 26 in Nyon, Switzerland. As part of the tribute, the director will give a masterclass on April 18 and be the focus of a selective retrospective of his documentary work.
The festival’s artistic director, Emilie Bujès, described Loznitsa as “a master of contemporary montage cinema” and highlighted his meticulous reworking of historical archives to reveal state violence and the echoes of history. According to her, both in his documentaries and fiction films, the filmmaker examines decisive moments of the 20th century and questions structures of power and memory through cinema of great formal rigor.
Among the programmed films are several centered on Ukraine’s political situation in recent decades. “Maidan” (2014), shot in just four months and presented in a special screening at Cannes, documents the protests that triggered the Ukrainian revolution. Also screening is “Donbass” (2018), whose script was based on amateur videos found on YouTube and portrays the takeover of the region by pro-Russian militias clashing with the Ukrainian army. It will be joined by “The Invasion” (2024), filmed over two years, which depicts the daily lives of civilians in different parts of the country and underscores the population’s resilience in the face of the Russian invasion.
The retrospective will also include “Austerlitz” (2016), a reflection on the banalization of Holocaust memory through black-and-white static shots observing tourists at a former concentration camp turned memorial. Other works will address the construction of collective memory in the post-Soviet space, such as “Blockade” (2005), composed entirely of footage from the Siege of Leningrad; “The Event” (2015), about the August 1991 coup in Moscow; and “Babi Yar. Context” (2021), which reconstructs without narration the largest massacre of Jews during World War II near Kyiv, a film that received the L’Œil d’or Special Jury Prize at Cannes.
