About the film

Belarussian director Sergei Loznitsa plunges into the moral abyss of the Second World War with this eerily tranquil, almost dreamlike drama based on a novel by Vassily Bykov.

In the middle of the night, mild-mannered railway worker Sushenya (Vladimir Svirski) is plucked from his home by two vindictive partisans. Having previously been arrested by the Nazis along with two others for sabotaging railroad tracks, Sushenya was the only one to escape the gallows. Sushenya’s inexplicable reprieve has naturally aroused the suspicions of his neighbours — which is precisely the plan of the German invaders, who had let Sushenya off the hook in order to draw his vengeful comrades out into the open. Taken deep into the forest by the men, one of whom is righteous resistance fighter Burov (Vladislav Abashin), Sushenya is oddly placid in the face of his imminent death; he even volunteers to bring a shovel along to dig his own grave. As Sushenya and Burov debate guilt, crime and punishment on the way to their fatal assignation — and as the German ambush closes in on them — the film reveals, in a series of flashbacks that come and go like visions, the dark past of the two men.

While allowing each scene to unfold at a slow, deliberate pace, Loznitsa and cinematographer Oleg Mutu create an ominously living, breathing forest — a beautifully blue-tinged shadowland that surrounds the characters in a dreamy haze, while ghostly, symbolic apparitions of animal life add a fairy-tale quality to the men’s slow passage. As these travellers make their inexorable way deeper into the woods, the divisions between darkness and light become ever more murky, until everything is erased by the fog — even, perhaps, guilt.

Wybrane festiwale i nagrody / Selected festivals and awards: 2012 – MFF Cannes: Nagroda FIPRESCI / Cannes IFF: FIPRESCI Award, 2012 – MFF Toronto / Toronto IFF, 2011 – Forum Kina Europejskiego Cinergia Łódz: Krzyształowa Łódka / European Cinema Forum Lodz: Cristal Boat, 2011 – Lubuskie Lato Filmowe Łagów: Złote Grono / Film Summer Lagow: Golden Grape

Attend the masterclass by Sergei Loznitsa. Warsaw, Tuesday, May 14, Kinoteka.