Dir: Sergei Loznitsa | Doc 2024 145′
Sergei Loznitsa’s The Invasion is one of the outstanding films of the festival. The director, born in Russia and raised in Ukraine, is a documentary/fiction filmmaker who since 1996 has built up a recognisable collection of 21 documentaries and 4 fiction films.
The Invasion opens with a mass for the dead and divides into chapters filmed during recurring four seasons linked to cycles of life including a wedding, funeral, communal baptism ceremonies, children at school, rifle training, abandoned dogs turned feral, recovery from wounds as well as the delivery of food.
The film is created out of 25/30 commissioned documentary short films supervised by Loznitsa between March 2022 through to early 2024. All the sequences employ Loznitsa’s characteristic natural soundscapes with neither music or narration and all filmed mid shot and long distant wide screen camera viewpoint without closeups.
These are not ordinary times though, as all the films are of people living everyday life during the Russian invasion of Ukraine that started on 24/2/22. Unlike other current documentaries made on the battleground or directly filmed inside war zones, this is more about an invasion felt, heard but not shown directly as if for the Ukrainian’s people this is an enemy which dare not speak its name.
Harrowing scenes of real time footage of severely wounded bodies being cared for by nurses and doctors showing neither blame nor anger become silent, quiet testaments to the power of others to heal and repair. In one of the most powerful sequences, books are bound with rope, transported into trucks and wait in a queue to be thrown onto conveyor belts.
Titles sporadically appear on the screen: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekov as they move alongside titles of philosophy, science and religious books. All will be destroyed and the viewer left to decipher the value and meaning of how what we love and learn from can also be systematically erased when countries suffer during warfare. At one point an elderly man muses that after 32 years of independence, life in Ukraine still feels like 1942.
Loznitsa is a filmmaker with archival knowledge of his country. With The Invasion he has created a moving requiem of resilience and resistance with febrile cross over links between sensitive fictional stories about people (A Gentle Creature and Donbass) and harrowing archival documents including the record of genocide massacre in Bab Yar Context 2021. He is a filmmaker who may well be unable to rest until life in Ukraine returns to normal.
THE INVASION won the In Spirit of Freedom award at Cannes 2024 and premiered at London Film Festivals 2024 | coming to UK cinemas in 2025