Showing posts with label Sergei Loznitsa. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sergei Loznitsa. Show all posts

Monday, October 7, 2013

Sergei Loznitsa - V tumane AKA In the Fog (2012)





Quote:
Western frontiers of the USSR, 1942. The region is under German occupation, and local partisans are fighting a brutal resistance campaign. A train is derailed not far from the village, where Sushenya, a rail worker, lives with his family. Innocent Sushenya is arrested with a group of saboteurs, but the German officer makes a decision not to hang him with the others and sets him free. Rumours of Sushenya’s treason spread quickly, and partisans Burov and Voitik arrive from the forest to get revenge. As the partisans lead their victim through the forest, they are ambushed, and Sushenya finds himself one-to-one with his wounded enemy. Deep in an ancient forest, where there are neither friends nor enemies, and where the line between treason and heroism disappears, Sushenya is forced to make a moral choice under immoral circumstances. —In The Fog official website

Sergei Loznitsa - Artel (2006)



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A classic of Russian documentary film he also stamps his typical hallmark on his latest film. Long shots fragmented with fade-outs, a sophisticated composition and the effective use of 35 mm black-and-white film. Loznitsa is able to raise seeming banality to the status of an artistic testimony indirectly reminiscent of the classics of Russian cinematography. On this occasion, he takes his camera along to record an attempt to catch fish in a frozen lake in the middle of the snowy Russian plains. In this harsh natural environment, four young men try to rip from the frozen depths of nature something which will provide them with a livelihood.

Thursday, November 10, 2011

Sergei Loznitsa - Northern Light AKA Lumière du Nord (2008)

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A small village located on the shores of the White Sea, 2008. In Northern Russia.

While winter has shrouded everything in the glacial night of the North, a few hours of light per day seep in on the eve of Easter in the village of Soumskiy Pozad, around a thousand kilometers to the north of Saint-Petersburg, in the province of Karelia. Connected to the rest of the country by a vague muddy road and a piece of railroad, the village experiences a suspended and mysterious time. The film is about the Russia of unending forests and potato fields. A few robust and intransigent people live peacefully, in no hurry by pressing needs. Two small girls have just been adopted by a family. The woman is sweet and soft-spoken, whereas the man is hot-tempered. It is Chekov’s Russia: still happy, yet torn apart, and cold.
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Sergei Loznitsa - Portret AKA Portrait (2002)

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This film is a collection of static portraits. It`s a one long pause. No words, silence.

Sergei Loznitsa - Schastye moe aka My Joy (2010)



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"My Joy" is a tale of truck driver Georgy. Georgy leaves his home town with a load of goods, but he is forced to take a wrong turning on the motorway, and finds himself in the middle of nowhere. Georgy tries to find his way, but gradually, against his will, he becomes drawn in the daily life of a Russian village. In a place, where brutal force and survival instincts overcome humanity and common
sense, the truck driver’s story heads for a dead end...

Saturday, October 23, 2010

Sergei Loznitsa - Poselenie AKA The Settlement (2001)

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Quote:
This visually arresting documentary about a strange community in the Russian countryside, shows residents of a rural settlement seemingly involved in everyday farm work -- harvesting fields, chopping wood, working at a sawmill and maintaining the property. Yet, as the film evolves, the viewer comes to realize that the workers, are in fact, patients. Their daily chores serve only therapeutic purposes. Suffused with the sounds and rhythms of rural life, is the film a parable of post-Soviet society or simply a testament to the importance of nature in modern lives?

Sergei Loznitsa - Predstavleniye AKA Revue (2008)



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Sergei Loznitsa has once again scoured the Russian film archives for REVUE, selecting excerpts from newsreels, propaganda films, TV shows and feature films that present an evocative portrait of Soviet life during the 1950s and 1960s. With scenes taken from the length and breadth of the Soviet Motherland, REVUE illustrates industry and agriculture (dam construction, steel plants, Stakhanovite labor competitions, farmland seeded by hand and plowed with horse), political life (local elections, abundant Lenin iconography, speeches by Khrushchev, the threat of capitalist spies), popular culture (a village choir, a dance troupe, a travelling cinema, poetry readings for workers, a propagandistic stage play), and technology (space exploration, astronaut Yuri Gargarin, new industrial development). The film's fascinating flow of disparate scenes representing typical Soviet life of the period is, seen from today's perspective, alternately poignant, funny, and tragic. The cumulative impact reveals a life of hardship, deprivation and seemingly absurd social rituals, but one always inspired by the vision, or illusion, of a communist future. Seen from these dual historical and contemporary perspectives, REVUE is both a nostalgic and instructive look back at a communist past that represents social engineering on a grand, and frightening, scale. (icarus-films)

Sergei Loznitsa - Polustanok aka Train Stop (2000)



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Trains travel through the night without stopping. The clatter of the carriages quickly disappears, along with the wail of the locomotive. The people at the station are all asleep. But why are they so exhausted ? And what are they waiting for?

Sergei Loznitsa - Zhizn, osin AKA Life, Autumn (1999)



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Quote:
What first appear to be photographs of elderly Russian peasants and farmers, becomes an evocative meditation on old Russia and new, a snapshot of a disappearing way of life. As they stand in their work clothes, often with tools by their side, looking into the camera, this remarkable film with poetic rigor, captures a people, a world, that is quickly vanishing.

Quote:
So wird aus alltäglichem eine ergreifende Wirkung erzielt, teilt sich der Lebensrhythmus, die Geschichte eines Volkes mit Wärme. Lakonie und Humor mit 'Leben, Herbst' schafft es in einer Kürze alle großen Fragen des menschlichen Lebens zu thematisieren und findet damit, Kulturen übergreifend, einen gemeinsamen Nenner. [MDR Kultur]

Sergei Loznitsa - Fabrika AKA Factory (2004)

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The filmmaker shows how a pure form of cinematography can indeed be created within the nitty-gritty of an archaic metal factory.

Thursday, August 21, 2008

Sergei Loznitsa - Blokada (Блокада) AKA Blockade (2006)



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Icarus Films PR about the movie:
The longest siege during World War II was that of Leningrad, which lasted for 900 days, from September 1941 to January 1944, when Hitler attempted to starve the Soviet city of three million people into submission. Estimates of the number of residents who died from starvation, disease or cold range from 641,000 to 800,000.

Comprised solely of rarely-seen footage found in Soviet film archives by director Sergei Losnitsa, BLOCKADE vividly re-creates those momentous events, featuring a meticulously reconstructed, state-of-the-art soundtrack added to the original black-and-white silent footage. The result gives viewers the eerie impression of being not just an observer but virtually a participant in the events as they unfold on the streets of Leningrad.