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The Event, with director Sergei Loznitsa in person

The Event, with director Sergei Loznitsa in person

The Event, by Sergei Loznitsa

Cinefamily and Los Angeles Filmforum present

The Event, with director Sergei Loznitsa in person!

At Cinefamily, 611 N Fairfax Avenue, Los Angeles 90036, 323-655-2510

Sergei Loznitsa in person! LA premiere!

NOTE THE CHANGE FROM OUR NORMAL DAY

Sergei Loznitsa is one of the most heralded filmmakers in Europe, but is still little known in America.  Generously supported by the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, Filmforum presents Loznitsa in Los Angeles for his first time, for in-person screenings at Filmforum, UCLA, Cal Arts, and Cinefamily.  This last night of the series features his film The Event, Loznitsa’s look at the events in Leningrad on the day when Soviet leadership attempted to overthrow Mikhail Gorbachev in a coup, by re-editing footage from the local television stations on those fateful days.

Educated originally in mathematics, Loznitsa redirected his life to filmmaking after the fall of the Soviet Union, and has been producing a series of documentaries since the mid-1990s looking at life in a wide array of places and events: portraits of small towns, fishing communities in Siberia, recoveries of political unrest, tourists in Nazi concentration camps. He’s been the subject of a retrospective at the International Documentary Festival of Amsterdam (IDFA), often considered the leading doc festival in Europe.  In recent years he has been working in scripted narrative films as well, making two films that have premiered at Cannes.  

The Event reviewed in Variety: http://variety.com/2015/film/festivals/the-event-review-1201628035/

Interview with Loznitsa in Variety: http://variety.com/2016/film/festivals/sergei-loznitsa-art-life-new-film-a-gentle-creature-idfa-1201923368

Tickets: $14 general $10 Filmforum members, $0 for Cinefamily members, at http://cinefamily.ticketmob.com/event.cfm?id=157509&cart

In addition to the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, Filmforum thanks the following entities for their support of this series: the UCLA Department of World Arts and Culture/Dance; the UCLA Center of European and Russia Studies; the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television; the UCLA Department of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Languages and Cultures; Cal Arts; Cinefamily; and the International Documentary Association.

Sergei Loznitsa was born September 5th, 1964 in the city of Baranovitchi, in Belarus. At that time Belarus was part of the Soviet Union. Later Loznitsa’s family moved to Kiev, Ukraine, where Loznitsa finished high school. In 1987 graduated from the Kiev Polytechnic with a degree in Applied Mathematics. In 1987-1991 Sergei worked as a scientist at the Kiev Institute of Cybernetics, specializing in artificial intelligence research. He also worked as a translator from Japanese. In 1997 Loznitsa graduated from the Russian State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) in Moscow, where he studied feature filmmaking.

Sergei Loznitsa has been making documentary films since 1996, and he has directed 16 award-winning documentaries. Sergei Loznitsa’s montage film “BLOCKADE” (2005) is based on the archive footage of besieged Leningrad. Loznitsa’s feature debut “MY JOY” (2010) premiered in the main competition at the Festival de Cannes, and was followed by “IN THE FOG”, which premiered in the competition of the 65th Festival de Cannes in May 2012, where it was awarded FIPRESCI prize.

In 2013 Sergei Loznitsa launched a film production and distribution company ATOMS & VOID. Sergei continues to work in both documentary and feature genres. His feature length documentary “MAIDAN”, depicting the Ukrainian revolution of 2013/2014 was also premiered at the Festival de Cannes. His latest feature-length documentary AUSTERLITZ looks at tourists negotiating the traumatic sites of Nazi concentration camps.  Loznitsa is currently producing his next feature film, “BABI YAR” which will narrate the events that took place in Kiev during the first months of Nazi occupation of the USSR. http://loznitsa.com

The Event 3

The Event

The Event

2015, The Netherlands/Belgium, DCP, 74 minutes

In Russian with English Subtitles. Production: ATOMS & VOID, www.facebook.com/atomsvoid

Trailer: https://vimeo.com/136982602

In August 1991 a failed coup d’état attempt (known as Putsch) was orchestrated by a group of hard-core communists in Moscow, and followed by the collapse of the USSR soon after. As president Gorbachev was detained by the coup leaders, state-run TV and radio channels broadcast nothing but Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake,” while crowds gathered in the streets. Via found footage taken by eight cameramen, Loznitsa examines those crowds, as they sway between confusion, disbelief, anger, and empowerment. A quarter of a century after the political upheaval it depicts, The Event asks what really happened during the tumultuous August of 1991 – the collapse of an empire, or simply its the seeds of its creative reimagining?

“The brilliance of “The Event” is the way Loznitsa brings us inside — not in the frantic meeting rooms of the plotters, but within the bosom of the people. Edited together from footage shot by eight cameramen who wandered the ever-increasing crowds that summer day in St. Petersburg, 400 miles away from the coup, the docu vividly captures the shift from bewilderment to empowerment as the population became ever more emboldened in their public disavowal of Bolshevism. Several parallel lines of thought emerge while watching the film, making the footage doubly gripping, and Loznitsa masterfully accesses all lines of inquiry. ..” – Jay Weissberg, Variety

Michael Sicinski review in Cinema Scope: http://cinema-scope.com/cinema-scope-online/tiff-2015-the-event-sergei-loznitsa-netherlandsbelgium-wavelengths/