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State Funeral
The following description was submitted by the event organizer.
Sergei Loznitsa
Netherlands/Lithuania
(2019, 135 mins., in Russian with English subtitles)
In master filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa’s latest foray unearthing troves of archival material for chillingly contemporary ends, he methodically ushers us through the unprecedented March 1953 funeral of dictator Josef Stalin. The funeral, which drew several million citizens to Red Square, completely shut down the vast country and marked a previously unthinkable event for the nation’s people. Rare footage—captured in both color and black-and-white by dozens of camera operators—shows a seemingly endless procession of mourners, while numbed speeches pay tribute on the ingeniously constructed soundtrack. An enrapturing compendium of surreal images and sounds from a world-historical event happening in a not-so-distant past, State Funeral proves Loznitsa’s expert command of the communist project’s audio-visual material.
This film also screens at 5:45 pm on 3/9 at OMSI