His films tend to attract general attention. While festival juries churn out awards, as seen in Cannes, Karlovy Vary and at Jihlava IDFF, viewers are charmed by the quiet pace of his poetic images he has recently employed to capture the revolutionary events at the MAIDAN square in Kiev. Sergei Loznitsa, director of the remarkable feature films My Joy and In the Fog, now receives another honour for the first time; the launch of his online world film retrospective. Ten documentaries by Sergei Loznitsa, including his yet unpublished film master class, are available from December 1 to 14 at the DAFilms.com portal for free.
The first world online retrospective of director Sergei Loznitsa has reached its grand finale! After a two-week presentation of ten documentary films by the director, DAFilms.com gives you a chance to watch Loznitsa’s latest, currently discussed and award-winning film MAIDAN from Saturday, December 13 to Sunday, December 21 exclusively and for free!
The Ukrainian revolution, which started at the turn of the winter of the past year as a protest movement against the country’s former president Viktor Yanukovych, is captured in the film by means of long takes of crowd scenes fragmented by moments of immediate violence of the clashes between the police and the demonstrators filmed on a mobile phone.
Why did Loznitsa decide for this very director’s approach? “It is a popular movement, and what I wanted to show, the subject of my film, is the people. If I start singling out individual characters—just two, three, four, five characters—it would not be the story of the people anymore. It would just be individual characters …“ (Filmcomment, November, 2014)
The film which had a premiere during a special screening at Cannes IFF has already won several international awards. For instance, it received the Grand Prize at Romania’s Astra Film Festival; the most recent award comes from the 55th edition of the Italian Festival Dei Popoli held in the past few days in Milan.
Do not miss the current world events rendered by directing star Sergei Loznitsa for free from December 13 to 21 at DAFilms.com!
Please note: Because of the licence agreement, the film is accessible in the following countries: Russia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldavia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Georgia, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Israel, Albania, Austria, Finland, Spain, all states of Central and Latin America.
A native of Ukraine, director Sergei Loznitsa is an exceptional personality in the field of film. His documentary as well as feature films are well received both by critics and by viewers, winning a whole range of awards at leading world festivals in Cannes, Toronto, Paris and Karlovy Vary among others. His studies at a technical university and his experience in the field of development of artificial intelligence contrast with the poetical language employed by the director to follow film narratives that are often set in Eastern Europe and traditional Russia with patience and in visually impressive detail.
"When you start working on a new film, it’s like working on a scientific theory from scratch. It’s only up to you how far into the corner you will push yourself in the process of creation. (...) But everything always starts from the very beginning. If you succeed, you will never find yourself in a dead end. Film is a theorem that has to arrive at a final point," says the director about his creative process.
The first online film retrospective of Loznitsa’s works offers nine documentary films made since 2000 to viewers around the world. Moreover, it presents a world premiere of Loznitsa‘s yet unpublished master class delivered by the director to the viewers of the Polish Planete Doc Film Festival in the spring of 2014. Entitled “Authenticity and the Phenomenon of Cinema“, it provides a unique chance to learn about the director’s original notion of the film medium.
The viewers should definitely not miss those films presented in the retrospective that have won several prestigious film awards. The black-and-white ARTEL (2006), awarded at Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival in 2007, employs a hypnotizing aesthetic to capture the everyday life of a Russian village which might seem banal at first sight, rendering ordinary activities such as fishing as a surprising and internal struggle.
An unconventional look into age-old traditions maintained even in modern society is introduced in the popular film MILAGRE DE SANTO ANTONIO (2012) following the ritual of consecrating animals in the north of Portugal. On the other hand, humour and irony employed by Loznitsa to comment on Soviet political propaganda are brought to the retrospective by the film collage REVUE (2008), revealing the mythology of the communist past based on the visual materials of Soviet propaganda of the 1950s and 1960s.
Watch the first online retrospective by Sergei Loznitsa for free from December, 1st to December 14th at DAFilms.com!
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