Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa is to be the special guest at the 57th edition of Swiss documentary festival Visions du Réel, which runs from April 17-26.
Loznitsa will give a masterclass at the festival, which will hold a selected retrospective of his documentary work.
Loznitsa, who studied film at the time of the collapse of the USSR, has 28 feature-length documentaries and five fiction films to his name.
Before becoming a filmmaker, Loznitsa worked as a scientist specialising in artificial intelligence at the Institute of Cybernetics in Kyiv.
Devoid of commentary, his raw footage documentaries, which mainly comprise static shots, focus on observing both current events and the traumas of the past.
They include Maidan (2014), presented in a special screening at Cannes, which chronicles the demonstrations that triggered the Ukrainian Revolution.
Donbass (2018), whose script was based on amateur videos found on YouTube, depicts the takeover of the Donbass region by Russian-speaking militias, and won the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes.
A special screening at Cannes, Babi Yar. Context (2021) recounts the largest massacre of Jews in World War II, which took place near Kyiv.
The Invasion (2024) continued his Ukrainian chronicles with a film about his country’s struggle against the Russian invasion, and played in competition at Cannes. His latest fiction Two Prosecutors also played in Cannes competition.
Loznitsa is also the founder of the production company Atoms & Void, and he has been based in Germany and Lithuania since the early 2000s.
“It is a tremendous honour for us to welcome a master of contemporary montage cinema. His work notably includes the meticulous re-examination of archives highlighting state violence and the stutter of History, as the images’ subtext is revealed with force and perseverance. In both his documentary and fiction works, Sergei Loznitsa retraces decisive moments in 20th-century history and questions the structures of power and memory through cinema of great rigour and precision,” said Emilie Bujès, artistic director of Visions du Réel.
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