Sergei Loznitsa: cinema with a social dimension

Sergei Loznitsa returns to Cannes after My Joy which featured In Competition two years ago. In the Fog is the Ukrainian director’s second fiction and is an adaptation of the book by Vasil Bykov.

Sergei Loznitsa began his career as a documentary filmmaker. After studying engineering, he graduated from the National Institute of Cinematography in Moscow. Since his cinematic beginnings, the social aspect of his films has been omnipresent; he wants his work to “make people react and push them to try to learn some vital things about life that they would not have imagined knowing.”

His first film, Today We Are Going to Build a House, filmed with Marat Magambetov, portays a united group who works together to build a house. In Portrait, several peasants in the Russian countryside talk about their daily lives. “I travelled all over Russia for my documentaries. I’ll never forget the experience I’ve had and the stories I was told.” Stories with a humanist resonance is a key feature of Sergei Loznitsa’s filmography.

In 2010, My Joy was the logical continuation of his documentaries. In this film he brings together the working-class stories he collected from Russia’s borders. In his second fiction, In the Fog, the Ukrainian filmmaker still depicts the working class, but this time he adds a historical dimension. A railway worker is wrongly accused under the Nazi occupation and two resistance members are ordered to kill him. As Sergei Loznitsa explains: “It is my duty to look at the past and – consequently – the future. This is because artists during the Soviet era had very few opportunities to reflect on the events that occured during those tragic years.”

QP

In The Fog will be screened on Friday 25th May 2012 at 16:00 at the Grand Théâtre Lumière