Sergei Loznitsa, the Ukrainian film-maker who refuses to be cancelled

By Dilip -

On 27 February, three days after Russian tanks rolled into his homeland, the Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa resigned from the European Film Academy. Loznitsa, an ebulliently professorial figure who moved with his family to Berlin in 2001, was furious that the EFA had issued a statement of solidarity with  Ukraine that he saw as too “neutral, toothless and conformist in relation to Russian aggression”. Then, on 19 March, Loznitsa announced he had been expelled from the Ukrainian Film Academy (UFA) for being a “cosmopolite”. He immediately understood the resonance of its slur. In an open letter published in Screen Daily, he wrote: “In the era of late Stalinism, this word acquired a negative connotation in Soviet propaganda.”

Loznitsa said he was really ousted from the UFA for opposing “the boycott of those of my colleagues, Russian [film-makers] who oppose the crimes of the Putin regime”. He also slammed the UFA for advocating that “when Ukraine is struggling to defend its independence, the key concept in the rhetoric of every Ukrainian should be their national identity. Not a civil position, not a desire to unite all sane and freedom-loving people in the fight against Russian aggression, not an international effort of all democratic countries to win this war – but ‘national identity’. Unfortunately, this is nazism.”…

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/mar/24/putin-is-just-the-frontman-sergei-loznitsa-the-ukrainian-film-maker-who-refuses-to-be-cancelled


P.B. Mehta: Ukraine invasion has revealed a new world disorder


JUAN COLE: The US would be on firmer ground declaring Putin a War Criminal if George W. Bush had been Tried / Aditya Chakrabortty: Western values? They enthroned the monster who is shelling Ukrainians today


Rohini Hensman: The Historical Background to Putin’s Invasion of Ukraine / Chris Hedges: The Greatest Evil Is War


10 Theses on the Proliferation of Egocrats (1977)


Ukraine: India refuses to take a clear position on the Russian invasion


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