“The Invasion”, an interview with director Sergei Loznitsa

July 1, 2024

Sergei Loznitsa immerses us in the deeper, terrifyingly ubiquitous consequences of war, invading daily life, destroying culture

"The Invasion", an interview with director Sergei Loznitsa Bénédicte Prot

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A talk with the immense filmmaker and documentary maestro Sergei Loznitsa on his latest non-fiction work, The Invasion, directed remotely from Berlin, where he resides, with the help of the talented cinematographers Evgeny Adamenko and Piotr Pawlus. The film premiered in Cannes, and is now screening at the 58th Karlovy Vary Film Festival in the Horizons section.

On the nature of the invasion of the title: “I’m not interested in showing the enemy – it never appears in the film: it’s the result of their action that appears, and we can see it in every minute of this film. We can feel that this war exists everywhere, and it influences society, and it transforms it, and this is what was interesting to me: how people find force and capacity, will and dignity, to protect themselves and to resist in these circumstances. And also, you can openly see that it’s impossible to defeat this people, impossible! […] People will resist until the last moment of their lives, and this gives strong emotion, and a strong image of a nation, and I wanted to show the Ukrainian people as a nation, because this nation is being created right now, it is being built right now, in this conflict – unfortunately, it has always happened like that in human history: people have united during wars, facing an aggression, against some enemy […]. This is unfortunate, I would prefer a better way to build a nation than that, but this is what I wanted to show.”

On obliterating culture: “I’m always asking myself how it is possible to destroy so completely culture, architecture, landscape, everything… On the front line, there’s no house left, they destroyed everything completely. What gives an enemy the possibility to destroy all these things that the culture produced: the monasteries, the churches, the buildings…? [Even after the barbarian invasions], they discovered all this knowledge from Greek or Roman times…, [but] with the way war happens now, it’s impossible. This territory is now a complete desert. Just to find all the mines, they calculate that it will take fifteen years to clean the territory… And the ground will be poisoned… I made a short film in a museum in Kyiv: thirty different civilisations were there. They have disappeared of course, but on this territory, there were many different civilisations, so this is much deeper than just this society and that society, this country and that country, this language and that language. It’s much deeper. Everything that’s happening now, I think that everybody should work on it. Of course, I understand that the Ukrainians have to protect themselves and fight and that they need weapons […], but it’s strange that in order to end this war, we have to bring in more and more weapons. There is something paradoxical in this sentence.”

On the episode where huge piles of books are destroyed: “This is a result, a reaction to the war, and it is understandable but you cannot accept that. I cannot accept that… And it’s not only Dostoyevsky, it’s all the books printed in Russian! Balzac, Zola… For me, it means destroying books as a concept because when you start with that, the next step is destroying your own books – and in the footage, I also found some books in Ukrainian! We have to think about that, or at least discuss that.”

Plot

"What does the invasion mean for ordinary people, and what consequences does it have for them? Ten years after the premiere of Maidan, Sergei Loznitsa’s second observational documentary captures the history of Ukraine as it unfolds before his eyes. Shot over the course of two years, his film recounts the actions of the people who have resisted oppression on a daily basis since the Russian invasion began. For some, it means fighting in the army or removing mines; for others, it is throwing out Russian books or simply living their lives – getting married, having children, repairing a damaged house, dying. Loznitsa’s silent observation of civilians is in fact a deafening statement on the reality of war and a tribute to the heroism of everyday life." Natalia Kozáková for Karlovy Vary IFF

Written by: Bénédicte Prot

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