When the eyes of the entire world were fixed upon Ukraine, veteran director Sergei Loznitsa set aside the projects he was working on and, in anticipation of future events, quickly set out for Kiev. He was able to capture the first week of protests when the air was filled with solidarity and harmony, as well as the sinister chill of later bloody street fighting. Without offering action or heroism, he charts the course of the uprising in long, almost exclusively static shots. As he stated: “Maidan is the first film in my rather long documentary career, when I actually had to follow the events of ‘real life’ as they were unfolding.” The intensity of this authentic documentary report, which screened at Cannes, comes from the surgical precision with which Loznitsa stitches together the understated individual microdramas. By means of captivating images, he communicates to the viewer the gravity of the endlessly drawn out days during which Maidan became home to hundreds of thousands of ordinary Ukrainians. KVIFF
DAFilms.com is powered by Doc Alliance, a creative partnership of 7 key European documentary film festivals. Our aim is to advance the documentary genre, support its diversity and promote quality creative documentary films.