Ukrainian film-maker Sergei Loznitsa: ‘Lies bring us to the catastrophe we are facing today’

 Ukrainian film-maker Sergei Loznitsa: ‘Lies bring us to the catastrophe we are facing today’

The director of ‘Donbass’ and ‘Maidan’ on the poison of propaganda, morals versus pragmatism — and how the west was duped by Putin

© Alamy

Geoffrey Macnab 5 HOURS AGO

Ukrainian film-maker Sergei Loznitsa is currently in Vilnius, Lithuania, putting the finishing touches to his latest feature documentary, The Natural History of Destruction. The title seems apt given that his homeland is currently under violent invasion from Vladimir Putin’s Russian forces.

The director’s new film, loosely inspired by WG Sebald’s book, is about the saturation bombing of German cities by the Allied forces during the second world war — and it also touches on the bombing of Coventry by the Luftwaffe. “It all connects to one of the main topics of war in the 20th or 21st century, which is: is it possible to use the civilian population as a tool of war?” Loznitsa explains.

As Russian troops advance on Ukrainian cities, civilians are again in the line of fire. “I am not surprised at all,” the director says of the Russian invasion. “I’ve been expecting such a development, predicting such a scenario, for months now. The thing that surprised me most was the blindness of people around me — of politicians who preferred to carry on as if nothing was happening.”

Sergei Loznitsa: ‘When I make my films . . . I propose to the spectator a kind of reflection. I put forward a question’ © Atoms & Void

The director looks back 14 years to when Putin made an ominous statement at a 2008 Nato summit. “Ukraine is not even a state,” the Russian leader said then. Loznitsa also points out that, since the collapse of the USSR, Russia has not undergone a healing and cathartic truth-and-reconciliation process, unlike postwar Germany, for example. “The Soviet Union as a country, as a system, was never put on trial and the crimes committed by Stalin and by all the other Soviet leaders were never admitted or recognised . . . there was never a Nuremberg trial of communism.”

Warming to his theme, the Ukrainian director, who was born in Belarus in 1964, argues that “the people who have been ruling Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union, building this criminal/terrorist regime, were [only] imitating western-style democratic values. That was just a simulation, a fake. All these years, they have been busy building this state which reconstructs everything from the original Soviet system.”

Loznitsa mocks western politicians for trusting Putin, and for trading with him. “They looked into his beautiful blue eyes and said, ‘Well, he’s a nice guy, we can do business with him.’ By doing that, they also contributed to the situation that we are in at the moment.”

In ‘Donbass’, Loznitsa explores the fallout from Russia’s military intervention in east Ukraine in 2014-15 © Atoms & Void

A civilian population is also caught up in the maelstrom of war in Loznitsa’s 2018 satirical dramatic feature, Donbass. The film was inspired by what happened in east Ukraine in 2014-15, during Russia’s military intervention, the demonstrations by pro-Russian groups and the armed conflict that followed. It begins in chilling but bravura fashion with an assorted group of what look like extras preparing for what seems to be a movie shoot. In fact, they’re getting ready for a YouTube-style “news report” being put together for propagandistic purposes, complete with some very real explosions.

Certain recent real-life events — for example last week’s Russian Federation Security Council meeting presided over by Putin — were, the director says, so “grotesque and absurd” that they could have been taken straight from Donbass. “The film shows how lies can poison and corrupt the human psyche . . . and how gradually lies and disinformation bring us to this catastrophe that we are facing today.”

It’s not just Putin that he excoriates. Western viewers may find Loznitsa’s recent, award-winning documentary Mr Landsbergis (2021) deeply uncomfortable. The film explores how Lithuania broke away from the Soviet Union without significant bloodshed in the period 1989-91 under its inspirational leader, Vytautas Landsbergis. The documentary portrays the revered former Soviet leader and Nobel Peace Prize-winner Mikhail Gorbachev in a very dark light and makes clear that many Lithuanians still regard him as a war criminal.

 . . . and 2019’s ‘State Funeral’, about the hysteria surrounding the death of Joseph Stalin © Atoms & Void

At times, it seems as if Loznitsa is trying to do the work in holding politicians to account that the Russian courts have avoided. In his archive-based films The Trial (2018), about a Stalin-era show trial in 1930, and State Funeral (2019), about the mass hysteria and grief that followed the death of Stalin in 1953, he has examined the cruelties and distortions of Soviet life in minute detail.

Loznitsa’s films rarely indulge in tub-thumping polemic. Instead, he tries to look at what he calls the “ontological conflict, the problem of the politics of morals and the politics of pragmatism . . . and we can see that pragmatism won.”

As a student, Loznitsa spent several years at the Russian State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow. He has many Russian friends from that period. “As far as I am concerned, it is not about being Russian,” he says. “It is about being a decent person, a moral person, or being an indecent person and an immoral person.” He scotches any idea that he harbours anti-Russian sentiments. His antipathy is towards the leaders, not the people.

His fellow Ukrainian film-maker Oleg Sentsov, who spent five years in a Russian penal colony following Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, recently declared on social media that he would enlist in the Ukrainian army. Loznitsa is not looking to do the same. He was last in Kyiv in October when his documentary, Babi Yar. Context, was shown as part of the commemorations of the 1941 massacre in which the Nazis and the Ukrainian police killed almost 34,000 Jews in the city. The Soviet authorities ended up “covering up the crimes of the Nazis”, as Loznitsa puts it. Anti-Semitism was so powerful in the USSR that when a memorial was erected in the mid-1970s, it didn’t even acknowledge that the Jews were the main victims of the slaughter.

Having made a documentary about Babi Yar, he is now planning a dramatic feature on the same subject. He aims to shoot it in Ukraine later this summer, circumstances permitting.

Loznitsa has spent much of his career making films, both documentaries and dramatic features, that have exposed the violence and corruption in the old Soviet Union and in the modern Russian state. Asked if he feels like a prophet in the wilderness, given that no one seems to have paid much attention to the warnings in his work, he waves aside the question.

“I don’t feel frustrated about this. When I make my films, I make them for myself in a way that I need to formulate a problem, an issue, describe it and find an answer for myself. In a way, I propose to the viewer a kind of reflection. I put forward a question.”

Loznitsa continues: “Most of my films are dealing with issues and problems we have inherited from the past. They’ve all originated a long time ago but they’ve never been resolved and are still with us today. This is all I can do, to reflect on a problem and formulate it. Then it is up to the viewers to do their work. I feel that I have been fulfilling my duty.” 

‘Donbass’ is on Amazon Prime now