New Zealand International Film Festival and City Gallery present
Dir. Sergei Loznitsa State Funeral 2019
Netherlands/Lithuania | Russian with English subtitles | 135min
Transporting us into a thronging mass of humanity amidst the state-mandated mourning and burial ceremony for Joseph Stalin, renowned Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa’s latest experimental documentary dives deep into long-forgotten government archives to patiently reveal a surreal picture of 'terror-induced delusion'.
Visually captivating, State Funeral uses colour and monochrome footage—remarkably crisp and clean at almost seventy years old—to produce an immersive experience, at once expansive and claustrophobic. Crowds amass in capacious town squares, with Stalin’s likeness looming large over all in the form of oversized statues and banners and the unending monologue of the public address system. Conversely, inside the Moscow House of Unions, the leader’s pale white corpse is dwarfed by its bed of floral wreaths; the cameras look away to individual displays of grief (or lack thereof) as mourners pass the bier. It is difficult not to wonder how much of the grief is authentic or staged. Without commentary, Loznitsa’s assemblage exposes the uneasy mix of reality, falsity and distortion presented in official documentation.
—Jacob Powell
On March 5, 1953, a shadow of death fell upon the 22.4 million square kilometres of the Soviet Union … The entire country stopped. All walks of society mobilized to take part in The Great Farewell, a four-day funeral-turned-stampede, in which many perished … While it is estimated that over 8.9 million people died under Stalin, hundreds gather to mourn on the anniversary of his death to this day … Part of Sergei Loznitsa’s informal trilogy of historical correctives, after The Event [NZIFF15] and The Trial (2018), State Funeral is his most visually stunning film to date, a bone-chilling deconstruction of the ceremony that ended one of history’s bloodiest regimes. Here is unprecedented access to the grotesque, tyrannical, and absurd experience of life and death under the so-called Red Tsar, the originator of fake news, whose legacy haunts the contemporary world.
—Dorota Lech, Toronto International Film Festival
Door sales thirty minutes prior to screening. All seats are general admission.
