REVUE

From the late 1960s on, the Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) documentary film studio was acclaimed for having established a school of its own and producing non-fiction gems shining with individual aesthetic signatures and the spirit of liberal humanity. What Loznitsa, an alumni of the school, does with studio-made cine-journals such as NASH KRAY (“Our Land”) amounts to nothing less than a film-historically important advancement of the genre of compilation film, as founded by Esfir Shub: precise dissection, analytically slanted, a playful handling of ritualized Soviet day-to-day life during the Cold War.