Visions du Réel • Special Guest 2026
A retrospective of the director who turns his gaze toward the fractures of post-Soviet spaces, excavating the political unconscious through the precise act of montage.
“We are living in times of moral decay and educational decline, while various new technologies are being developed in order to manipulate our minds and our behaviour. These technologies are capable of bringing existential destruction to human society. As far as I’m concerned, it is only culture that can safeguard us against barbarity.” — Sergei Loznitsa’s State of Cinema
Like Dziga Vertov alluded to in the title, Loznitsa works with images as historical material: shaped, ordered, and made legible through editing. His films return to the Soviet and post-Soviet space not to stabilise its meaning, but to examine how that meaning is constructed: through archives, spectacle, and collective behaviour.
Working across documentary and fiction, Loznitsa assembles images—archival and contemporary—into rigorous structures. Films such as State Funeral and The Event revisit the spectacle of power and the construction of collective memory; Maidan and The Invasion confront the present, observing Ukraine at moments when history is violently unfolding. The ongoing Russian war against Ukraine is not simply a subject here, it is the condition under which these images are produced and seen. For Loznitsa, this war is also personal.
As he stated in his 2024 State of Cinema address for Sabzian, we are increasingly pushed into “a uniformed and conformist intellectual environment, in which everything is black-and-white.” Against this, his cinema proposes something slower and more demanding: a space for ambiguity, for contradiction, and for critical thought. It does not offer moral shortcuts, but insists on looking at how events unfold, how narratives are formed, and how easily they harden into dogma.
This program brings together 10 films that span decades and forms, but share a common method: to return to images and hold them long enough for their complexity to emerge. In a moment defined by urgency, outrage, and simplification, Loznitsa’s cinema asks for something less immediate and more demanding: attention, doubt, and the willingness to think beyond ready-made positions.
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