02/12/2014 - Ten documentaries by the Ukranian filmmaker, including his yet unpublished film master class, are available from 1-14 December 1 at the DAFilms.com portal for free

The online documentary platform DAFilms.com is celebrating the first online film retrospective of Sergei Loznitsa’s works, offering nine documentary films made since 2000 to viewers around the world. Moreover, it presents a world premiere of Loznitsa's yet unpublished master class delivered by the director to the viewers of the Polish Planete Doc Film Festival in the spring of 2014. Entitled “Authenticity and the Phenomenon of Cinema“, it provides a unique chance to learn about the director’s original notion of the film medium.

A native of Ukraine, Loznitsa is an exceptional personality in the field of film. His documentary as well as feature films are well received both by critics and by viewers, winning a whole range of awards at leading world festivals in Cannes, Toronto, Paris and Karlovy Vary among others. His studies at a technical university and his experience in the field of development of artificial intelligence contrast with the poetical language employed by the director to follow film narratives that are often set in Eastern Europe and traditional Russia with patience and in visually impressive detail.

The films presented in the retrospective have won several prestigious film awards. The black-and-white Artel (2006), awarded at Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival in 2007, employs a hypnotizing aesthetic to capture the everyday life of a Russian village which might seem banal at first sight, rendering ordinary activities such as fishing as a surprising and internal struggle. An unconventional look into age-old traditions maintained even in modern society is introduced in the popular film The Miracle of Saint Anthony (2012) following the ritual of consecrating animals in the north of Portugal. On the other hand, humour and irony employed by Loznitsa to comment on Soviet political propaganda are brought to the retrospective by the film collage Revue (2008), revealing the mythology of the communist past based on the visual materials of Soviet propaganda of the 1950s and 1960s.