MAIDAN

Maidan Nezalezhnosti, Independence Square in Kyiv, from December 2013 to February 2014. It begins with people singing the national anthem, with field kitchens, speeches from the stage, night watches in the cold. It ends with barricades, burning tyres, smoke and the dead. In “Maidan” (Ukraine, 2014), Sergey Loznitsa records the protests against the Yanukovych government from their beginning to their escalation, with an almost always static camera that looks upon the crowd and singles no individual out. There is no commentary, no interviews, no heroes, only a few intertitles and a crowd that forms itself into something.

Loznitsa, who as a documentarian has long worked with archive material and observational wide shots, refuses interpretation and leaves it to the sound – chants, announcements, explosions – to tell the course of events. The film premiered in Cannes as a special screening in May 2014, only a few months after the events. “Maidan” was shown at Around the World in 14 Films in Berlin in 2014 in the Ukraine Spezial section.

Shown at the 2014 edition of Around the World in 14 Films.

All films 2014 · Film Archive