A Bracing Tale of Stalinist Terror
Earlier in his career, the Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa alternated between documentaries and narrative features. The documentaries tended to be distanced, austere, observational; those that focused on the past (such as 2005’s Blockade, about the WWII siege of Leningrad, or 2019’s State Funeral, about the funeral of Stalin) were often built entirely from archival footage….
