Sergey Loznitsa
The enigma of the personality cult is revealed in the grand spectacle of Stalin’s funeral. The film is based on unique archive footage, shot in the USSR on March 5 – 9, 1953, when the country mourned and buried Joseph Stalin.
In the Donbas, a region of Eastern Ukraine, a hybrid war takes place, involving an open armed conflict alongside killings and robberies on a mass scale perpetrated by separatist gangs. In the Donbass, war is called peace, propaganda is uttered as truth and hatred is declared to be love. A journey through the Donbas unfolds as a chain of curious adventures, where the grotesque and drama are as intertwined as life and death. This is not a tale of one region, one country or one political system. It is about a world, lost in post-truth and fake identities. It is about each and every one of us.
Loosely inspired by Dostoyevsky’s short story A Gentle Creature about a woman who travels to a prison in a remote region to track down her incarcerated husband.
Western frontiers of the USSR, 1942. The region is under German occupation. A man is wrongly accused of collaboration. Desperate to save his dignity, he faces an impossible moral choice.