BLOCKADE

Working in Moscow archives, Sergej Loznica unearthed this disturbing footage of Leningrad under siege, and assembled his material into an extraordinary documentary poles apart from the over-dramatizing structure of old newsreels. An almost ghostly calm hangs over these scenes of life and death from a beleaguered city. We see the empty streets, the half-starved people queuing for food, corpses by the roadside, bombs exploding – a city and its inhabitants stoically struggling to survive. With a subtle soundtrack now added to the originally silent images, the footage seems detached from the historical circumstances, as if sketching the situation in a no-man’s lands of our own world. Before the screening, renowned translator Peter Urban will read a selection of his German renderings of poems by Gennadij Gor (1907-1981). During the blockade, Gor produced a cycle of more than 90 poems with classical metres and shocking rhymes, documenting the suffering in the beleaguered city.