Blockade, Revue & Landscape DVD & Download

Blockade, Revue and Landscape are feature-length films made between 2003 and 2008. Each has its own topic and style, and yet as a group they give a good idea of Sergei Loznitsa’s way of looking at the world. The release of this special DVD set will allow UK viewers to discover three much revered but mostly unseen documentary films by Sergei Loznitsa.

BLOCKADE
The longest siege during World War II was that of Leningrad, which lasted for 900 days, from September 1941 to January 1944, when Hitler attempted to starve the Soviet city of three million people into submission. Estimates of the number of residents who died from starvation, disease or cold range from 641,000 to 800,000. Comprised solely of rarely seen footage found in Soviet film archives, Blockade vividly re-creates those momentous events, featuring a meticulously reconstructed, state-of-the-art soundtrack added to the original black-and-white silent footage.

LANDSCAPE
Winter. People are waiting for a bus in the Russian town of Okulovka. They talk. Listening to their conversations, the viewer is immerged in the world they live in. United by the movement of the camera, the whole place and the people blend together. Reminiscent of the work of Michael Snow and of Chantal Akerman in D’Est (1992), Landscape is an absorbing documentary showing both the people waiting for a bus and the atmosphere of this wintery wait, the tensions and worries featured in discussions recorded separately from the image, resulting in a poignant and often funny documentary.

REVUE
In Revue, Sergei Loznitsa researched footage from the 1950s and 1960s, selecting excerpts from newsreels, propaganda films, TV shows and feature films that present a portrait – in images - of Soviet life during the same period. The film's fascinating flow of disparate scenes representing a certain idea – and ideal- of Soviet life, appear, from today's perspective, as alternately poignant, funny, and tragic. The cumulative impact reveals a life of hardship, deprivation and seemingly absurd social rituals, but one always inspired by the vision, or illusion, of a communist dream.

Born in 1964 in Belarus, Sergei Loznitsa grew up in Kiev where he studied applied mathematics and later worked as a researcher on artificial intelligence.

He then decided to study directing at the Moscow Institute of Cinematography (VGIK), and graduated in 1997. He has been making award-winning documentaries since 1996, starting with Today We Are Going to Build a House (1996) and Life, Autumn (1998). In 2000, he began producing documentaries at the Documentary Films Studio in St. Petersburg, including The Train Stop (2000), The Settlement (2001), Portrait (2002), Landscape (2003), and Factory (2004). Blockade (2005) and Revue (2008) are compilations of footage from Soviet archives, much of it made available to filmmakers for the first time.

In 2010 he completed his first feature film My Joy, premiered in the main competition of the Cannes Film Festival, to great critical acclaim. In The Fog was his second feature film. It received its international premiere at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival and was widely praised by the critics and public alike. In the Fog was released by New Wave Films in the UK and Ireland on the 26^th of April 2013 and in VOD, DVD and Blu Ray on the 26^th of August.

Filmography

Feature‐Length Fiction Films

2012 In the Fog

2010 My Joy

Feature‐Length Documentaries

2008 Revue

2008 Northern Light

2005 Blockade

2003 Landscape

2001 Settlement

Documentary Shorts

2012 O Milagre de Santo Antonio

2006 Artel

2004 Factory

2002 Portrait

2000 The Train Stop

1998 Life, Autumn

1996 Today We Are Going to Build a House

BLOCKADE

documentary film, 2005, 52 min, b/w,, stereo, 35 mm
Directed by Sergei Loznitsa

REVUE

documentary film, 2008, 83 min, b/w, dolby digital 5.1, 35 mm
Directed by Sergei Loznitsa

LANDSCAPE (Peyzazh)

documentary film, 2003, 60 min., color, mono, 35 mm
Directed by Sergei Loznitsa

“Blockade doesn't barrage you with battle scenes; instead, we get eerie moments of calm as people walk down snowy streets littered with corpses and tanks roll off into the distance.” —David Fear, Time Out New York

“What narrative there is, along with a sense of incrementally mounting horror, emerges unbidden from the images-teeming streets that gradually thin, bundled proles panning for filthy water in potholes, stick-thin pedestrians stepping matter-of-factly past.”—Jim Ridley, Village Voice

"A starkly unsanitized and riveting montage of the nearly 900-day blockade... a powerful portrayal... ideal for college classroom use."—Richard Bidlack, Slavic Review

"Different and imaginative... One of the most important Russian movies of the last decade... THE BLOCKADE is an important film that belongs in every university library."—Denise Youngblood, The Russian Review

"Recommended! Very well done... A valuable contribution to those studying the impact of war."—Educational Media Reviews Online

"Absorbing... poignant viewing!"—Variety

"An often gruesome but prosaically candid mosaic of life during the siege...a useful and revealing effort."—Slavic Military Studies Journal

"Stark...harrowing...These pieced-together black-and-white sequences chronicle the deterioration of an austere, stately city into a snowbound graveyard of scarred buildings and numbed survivors."— Stephen Holden, The New York Times

"Fascinating and disturbing... a big-screen treasure for war and history buffs."—Film Journal International

"The sheer magnitude of the largely unknown images alone makes this a worthwhile documentary for anyone interested in the Siege of Leningrad or World War II, but it is the poignancy of certain images that gives this documentary its particular value."—Military History

"Riveting... a technical marvel... in making BLOCKADE, Loznitsa cut, edited, and added a soundtrack to archival footage to open history to new interpretive possibilities and deeper comprehension." -Tony Osborne, Film & History

About REVUE

“Director Sergei Loznitsa says more about Soviet art and politics than any talking head or narrated documentary ever could.”
Eric Monder, Hollywood Reporter

‘Revue melds disparate images of Soviet life during the 1950s and '60s into a luminous time capsule of patriotic fervor and political fealty.’
Jeanette Catsoulis, The New York Times

"A new perspective on Soviet life. ...REVUE offers a geographically and chronologically broader perspective on the post-Stalinist Soviet Union. ...It offers unprecedented coverage of the propaganda of the period, whose strong continuities with Stalin-era public culture appear especially interesting in light of the recent scholarship's critique of the thaw paradigm. ...The film is a valuable primary source for teachers to use..."—Polly Jones, University College, University of Oxford, Slavic Review, Spring 2012

“Loznitsa combines a knack for finding sociological meaning in throwaway moments with a less-is-more aesthetic... By juxtaposing labor-filled activities with TV shows and plays proclaiming the ‘bounties’ of revolution, the film offers glimpses of a government-sanctioned alt universe.” —Time Out New York

“Fascinating... a well-edited documentary that’s equally informative and entertaining.” —Avi Offer, The NYC Movie Guru

"Loznitsa's narration-free compilation of documentary scenes from the Soviet way of life is a must for anyone interested in glimpsing the disappeared Soviet experience. An unorthodox iconography of society, culture and politics in the old U.S.S.R."—Louis Menashe, Polytechnic Institute of New York University

‘The camera pans slowly across the 'landscape' of faces while, on a separate recording for the soundtrack, we hear people – young and old – talking about their woes and worries and will to survive by living each day as it comes. Finally, the bus arrives – an hour late – exactly the amount of time Loznitsa required to shoot this remarkable candid-camera documentation’.

Ron Holloway, Kinema

‘Less is more for Landscape, an austere but absorbing formalist exercise consisting entirely of left-to-right tracking shots depicting people waiting for a bus in the Russian town of Okulovka. Well-regarded Russian docu-helmer Sergei Loznitsa's ('Portrait') experimental approach may seem reminiscent of '60s avant-garde darling Michael Snow ('Wavelength'), although it's closer to the stripped-down style of contempo Ruskie doc-makers… ‘

Variety

For film bookings please contact Colin Burch at Verve Pictures — [email protected]. Press resources are on the Press page.