Cinema
Mr. Landsbergis
Sergueï Loznitsa
11 Mar 2022
The event is over
Vytautas Landsbergis, a professor of music, was also the charismatic leader of the Lithuanian independence movement. In 1990 he led his country to secede from the USSR and forced Gorbachev to recognise its sovereignty. Thirty years later, Mr. Landsbergis evokes the hidden history of his nation's combat for independence.
Sergueï Loznitsa, Mr. Landsbergis, 2021. Netherlands-Lithuania, 246 min.
Vytautas Landsbergis is sitting peacefully in an armchair in the garden of his house. As a founding member of Sajudis, the party campaigning for the restoration of Lithuanian independence, he was engaged in his country's liberation movement until he was elected first President of the Republic of Lithuania in 1990. He responds to the questions of film maker Sergueï Loznitsa, facing him out of frame. Vytautas Landsbergis recounts the story of the liberation in detail, day after day, year after year, speech after speech, and Loznitsa corroborates with material he knows well. Working from precious archives of demonstrations, gatherings, speeches and meetings, and guided by his usual talent for bringing the past to life and observing it from all angles, he retraces the events with great precision. The archives are minutely edited and scripted. Loznitsa finds a counterpoint for every point, and weaves a fascinating narrative. A story of power struggles and an account of a victory made possible by massive and tenacious commitment. Because after each congress of deputies, or faced with the invasion of the Russian army, which had to be pushed back, who was in charge? The crowd. As the Soviet Union was breaking up and crumbling, the crowd in the streets of Vilnius never retreated. In suffering but rarely in terror, tightly knit, united in the streets, before the podiums or facing the soldiers. Looks encountered in the endless processions seem to say that it is here that those who mobilised for the liberation of the country felt the greatest surge of emotion. Their voices recount it and the film is filled with their chants. "A singing revolution" and the voice of a man to turn history around.
Clémence Arrivé
As part of the Cinéma du Réel 2022
Sergueï Loznitsa was born in 1964 and grew up in Kiev in Ukraine. In 1997 he graduated from the VGIK, Russian Film Institute in Moscow, where he studied. He has made films since 1996: twenty-three documentaries, including the feature-length Maidan (2014), Sobytie (2015), Austerlitz (2016), The Trial (2018), State Funeral (2019) and four fiction films: My Joy (2010), In the Fog (2012), A Gentle Creature (2017), Donbass (2018).
When
7pm - 11:30pm
Where
©Atoms & Void