Atoms & Void

In 1937, amidst Stalin's Great Terror, a newly appointed prosecutor for the USSR is made aware of alleged corruption in the Secret Police, and takes it upon himself to investigate.

Three separate stories – a mother, her teenage daughter, and a police officer – converge thanks to one event: the titular incident, wherein a dog is injured.

The enigma of the personality cult is revealed in the grand spectacle of Stalin’s funeral. The film is based on unique archive footage, shot in the USSR on March 5 - 9, 1953, when the country mourned and buried Joseph Stalin.

In the historic Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, despite the cruel war that has been raging since 2014 between the self-proclaimed People's Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk and the Ukrainian government, people try to survive in the rotten heart of chaos, where violence disguises itself as peace, propaganda becomes univocal truth and hatred reigns in the name of love.

A woman lives in a small village in Russia. One day she receives the parcel she sent to her husband, serving a sentence in prison. Confused and angered, she sets out to find why her package was returned to sender.

A comprehensive chronicle of the consequences of Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022. How citizens live in wartime, how violence and death condition daily life: from schools in bomb shelters to rehabilitation centers for the maimed; wounds and silences, gestures and words.

A chronicle of the civil uprising against the regime of Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych that took place in Kyiv in the winter of 2013/14. The film follows the progress of the revolution: from peaceful rallies, half a million strong in the Maidan square, to the bloody street battles between protesters and riot police.

Nazi troops massacre 30,000 Jews over a three-day period in September 1941. Babyn Yar ravine in Kyiv, Ukraine.

Leopold Trepper, a former Red Army officer and hero of the anti-Nazi resistance, faces a Kafkaesque struggle in 1970s Poland as the demons of anti-Semitism resurface. Stripped of his job and under constant surveillance, Trepper leaves with no hope of return.

June 2023, one year since Russia invaded Ukraine. In Kyiv, a class is visiting the Natural History Museum, guided by a paleontology teacher who transports the schoolchildren into a faraway and peaceful world.

This film about the Baltic nation of Lithuania from 1989 to 1991, when it broke away from the Soviet Union. This period of peaceful protests involving lots of singing came to be known as the "singing revolution."

In August 1991 a failed coup d'état attempt (known as Putsch) led by a group of hard-core communists in Moscow, ended the 70-year-long rule of the Soviets. The USSR collapsed soon after, and the tricolour of the sovereign Russian Federation flew over Kremlin. As president Gorbachev was detained by the coup leaders, state-run TV and radio channels, usurped by the putschists, broadcast Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake" instead of news bulletins, and crowds of protestors gathered around Moscow's White House, preparing to defend the stronghold of democratic opposition led by Boris Yeltsin, in the city of Leningrad thousands of confused, scared, excited and desperate people poured into the streets to become a part of the event, which was supposed to change their destiny. A quarter of a century later, Sergei Loznitsa revisits the dramatic moments of August 1991 and casts an eye on the event which was hailed worldwide as the birth of "Russian democracy".

Is it morally acceptable to use the civilian population as yet another tool for waging war? Is it possible to justify death and destruction for the sake of supposedly lofty ideals? The question remains as pertinent today as it was at the beginning of World War II, and it is becoming increasingly urgent to answer, as countless tragedies have been caused by unethical political decisions.

In 1930 in Moscow, USSR. the Soviet government puts a group of top rank economists and engineers on trial, accusing them of plotting a coup d'état. The charges are fabricated and the punishment, if convicted, is death.

The Kyiv Trial, also known as the ‘Kiev Nuremberg’, took place in January of 1946 in the Soviet Union, and was one of the first post-war trials convicting German Nazis and their collaborators. 15 criminals, guilty of atrocities, which were later identified by the Nuremberg trials as “crimes against humanity”, faced justice in case No.1679 “On the atrocities committed by fascist invaders on the territory of the Ukrainian SSR.” Using unique, previously unseen, archive footage, Sergei Loznitsa reconstructs key moments of the proceedings, including statements of the defendants and testimonies of the witnesses, survivors of Auschwitz and Babi Yar among them. The film lays bare the ‘banality of evil’ and is devastatingly relevant today, as Ukrainian people are once again being subjected to the violence of barbarian invaders.

The film shows life in contemporary Sarajevo as reflected through glass covers of the black-and-white photos of its defenders, taken by the Bosnian photographer Milomir Kovacevic in 1992 during the siege of the city.