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Maidan movie: preview and discussion
November 26, 2014 @ 8:20 pm - 10:30 pm
$11
Maidan – Preview + Discussion
Dir. Sergei Loznitsa
Ukraine / Netherlands – 2014 – 130mins
Wednesday 26th November, 2014 at 8:20pm
ICA
Institute of Contemporary Arts, The Mall, London, SW1Y 5AH
Winner: Best Film, Astra Film Festival, 2014
Official Selection: Cannes Film Festival, 2014
Official Selection: BFI London Film Festival, 2014
Official Selection: Toronto International Film Festival, 2014
“Astounding, terrifying, beautiful” Nick James, Sight & Sound
“This stunning, epic-scaled film harkens back to the heroic, journalistic roots of documentary-making and yet feels ineffably modern and formally daring.” The Hollywood Reporter
Acclaimed director Sergei Loznitsa returns to documentary with this vital and urgent film about Ukraine’s anti-government protests in Kiev’s Maidan Square. Filmed over a period of ninety days, Loznitsa shoots from fixed camera positions capturing a carnival of singing, speeches, music and food. The people of Maidan appear to be full of promise and hope. But these scenes are stained with tension as we await the inevitable climax, as peaceful protest descends into violent street battle, Loznitsa frames it in the same beautiful, objective manner.
Epic in scale, breathtakingly cinematic and critically urgent, Maidan is a film to be experienced. This is portrait of an awakening nation rediscovering its identity is not just a document of a historic turning point for Ukraine, but a moving testament to human solidarity. This is formidable filmmaking.
The screening will be followed by a discussion with Raisa Sidenova a film historian specialising in Soviet documentary film and doctoral candidate at Yale University and Joanna Szostek, a postdoctoral research fellow at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, UCL.