‘Donbass’ Director Sergei Loznitsa Opposes Total Ban on Russian Cinema

Etan Vlessing
·3 min read

Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa has come out against calls for a total ban on Russian cinema and filmmakers at major international festivals.

“Among Russian filmmakers, there are people who have condemned the war, who oppose the regime and openly expressed their condemnation. And in a way they’re victims of this whole conflict like the rest of us,” Loznitsa told The Hollywood Reporter on Monday. “I was hoping that society these days is more intelligent, more sophisticated, than to apply this collective guilt to an entire community,” he added.

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Loznitsa was talking ahead of his latest movie, Donbass, getting a U.S. commercial release on April 8. His comments also came as the Ukrainian State Film Agency wrote to the Cannes Film Festival’s Pierre Lescure and Roberto Cicutto, president of the Venice Film Festival, to call for a total ban on all films created in Russia, or involved in a co-production, being screened in and out of competition.

“If we are talking about this proposal to completely ban, to boycott Russian films and Russian filmmakers from participating in international film festivals, I’m absolutely against this,” Loznitsa told THR.

Donbass, which opened Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section in 2018 and earned Loznitsa a best director prize at that event, is centered on eastern Ukraine, where a civil conflict was started in 2014 between Ukrainian soldiers and pro-Russian separatists and paramilitary gangs. But now that Russian President Vladimir Putin has launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Loznitsa insisted his only surprise was the West didn’t see the widening assault coming.

“I was surprised the majority of people in the world were surprised. They didn’t expect this. The events that are taking place recently [in Ukraine], I don’t see them as anything new,” he explained. Loznitsa credits Russia’s use of misinformation, including spreading false digital news stories in foreign media and on social media platforms, with the West ignoring Putin’s real designs on European politics and disputes for so long.

“Ever since the Soviets and the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917, they’ve been very successful in fabricating this reality, and it’s very, very successful and very persuasive,” he argued. With that mastery of disinformation in mind, Loznitsa in Donbass offers no typical dramatic narrative with good guys and bad guys.

Instead, he presents a circular structure of interconnected incidents and events laid out over 13 vignettes. Loznitsa argued he could not have tackled Russia’s varied attempts to distort and manipulate the facts around eastern Ukraine invasion to justify taking over a sovereign democratic country if he restricted himself to one point of view.

And Loznitsa defended his use of dark comedy in Donbass by pointing to what he sees as continuing inaction by the West. As an example, he pointed to Russia, through its U.N. Security Council representatives, recently voting down a United Nations resolution to demand that Putin immediately stop his attack on Ukraine.

“You watch the representative of Russia making his speeches that are absolutely absurd. This reminds me of Dr. Strangelove,” Loznitsa said, while adding Russia’s right of veto at the U.N. layered on even more absurdity. “We see this seemingly serious organization with very serious purposes. And it becomes really laughable, a joke, because of the absurdity of this situation involving serious people,” the Ukrainian director said.

Film Movement is releasing Donbass, which stars Tamara Yatsenko, Irina Zayarmiuk and Grigory Masliuk, in the U.S. market.

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