Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa arrives at the Cannes Film Festival this week with his latest documentary, “The Invasion,” worried that the world’s attention has largely drifted from the Ukraine conflict in the two-plus years since Russia’s brutal and unprovoked invasion. The film premieres with a special screening May 16.
Yet from the movie’s powerful opening sequence, which follows a funeral procession for four soldiers killed in battle, Loznitsa reminds us that the war continues to extract a devastating cost from its victims. And he also reminds us that his countrymen will continue to fight for their freedom, whether or not the world is watching.
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“You can see the resilience and at the same time the hatred toward the enemy, and the pain and the trauma and the horror that every person in Ukraine is experiencing,” the director tells Variety. “It becomes obvious that it’s impossible to destroy these people. These people won’t surrender.”
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“The Invasion” sees Loznitsa returning to Cannes two years after premiering “The Natural History of Destruction,” an archive documentary about the devastation wrought by aerial bombing in World War II. The director is a master chronicler of the past, but his latest was conceived as “a series of urgent, almost real-time dispatches,” he says, capturing episodes from daily life around Ukraine in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion. Here’s an exclusive look at the trailer:
Filming began on Aug. 24, 2022, six months to the day after Russian forces swept into the country, and on the 31st anniversary of Ukraine’s declaration of independence from the Soviet Union. The director worked with small crews composed of a cameraman, a camera assistant and a sound recordist who shot on location in Kyiv and around Ukraine. Loznitsa, meanwhile, was receiving the footage in Vilnius, Lithuania, working with a sound designer to edit the dispatches as they arrived.
The acclaimed filmmaker says he employed a similar method during the production of “Maidan,” his critically praised documentary about Ukraine’s 2014 revolution, describing “The Invasion” as a “continuation” of that work. A third film is already in development that would complete a triptych spanning more than a decade of Ukraine’s struggle “to retain its independence,” he says.
Despite the suggestion of its title, there is nothing of the conventional war documentary about “The Invasion.“ The Russian forces laying waste to Ukraine are never glimpsed on screen. “From the beginning, I decided that I wasn’t interested in showing the enemy or showing battle scenes,” Loznitsa says. “As far as I’m concerned, in every episode of the film, the invisible presence of the enemy and the presence of war and the presence of destruction and danger is felt very strongly.”
This year’s Cannes Film Festival kicks off just days after the U.S. announced a $400 million boost in military aid for Ukraine, part of a $60 billion aid package passed by Congress last month after a long and contentious partisan struggle. Loznitsa, however, insists that world leaders still haven’t fully reckoned with the stakes of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s disastrous war on his homeland.
“I don’t think that the outside world is doing enough. I also don’t think that it’s a war between Russia and Ukraine; I think it’s the war between Russia and the civilized world,” he says. “Russia is fighting against the civilized world in Ukraine. And the countries that belong to this civilized world are already participating in this war.
“Unfortunately, most of the Western leaders don’t seem to see this war as such. They don’t seem to grasp this idea,” he continues. “At the moment, they support Ukraine enough to sustain the frontline, but they’re not giving enough to ensure that the war doesn’t spread and at some point come to their own borders.”
European leaders have been debating measures to shore up the continent’s defenses in the face of possible Russian aggression; Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk recently warned that Europe is in a “pre-war era” and has a “long way to go” before it will be ready to counter a potential attack by its bellicose eastern neighbor.
The director says he frequently finds himself wondering “how to stop this madness.” “As far as I’m concerned, it’s insanity,” he says. But for a filmmaker whose body of work offers a sobering reminder of mankind’s consistent failure to learn from its mistakes, Loznitsa’s optimism remains stubbornly persistent. “If I hadn’t thought that there is still … some kind of glimpse of hope for a better future,” he says, “I wouldn’t have continued working.”