Muristek
‘Putin is just the frontman’: Sergei Loznitsa, the Ukrainian film-maker who refuses to be cancelled
The director of Donbass and In the Fog resigned from the European academy and got booted off his country’s awards body. He explains why we must listen to other voices in Russia and Ukraine as the third world war has already started
On 27 February, three days after Russian tanks rolled into his homeland, the Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa resigned from the European Film Academy. Loznitsa, an ebulliently professorial figure who moved with his family to Berlin in 2001, was furious that the EFA had issued a statement of solidarity with Ukraine that he saw as too “neutral, toothless and conformist in relation to Russian aggression”.
Then, on 19 March, Loznitsa announced he had been expelled from the Ukrainian Film Academy (UFA) for being a “cosmopolite”. He immediately understood the resonance of its slur. In an open letter published in Screen Daily, he wrote: “In the era of late Stalinism, this word acquired a negative connotation in Soviet propaganda.”
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