The Invasion. 2024. Netherlands/France. Written and directed by Sergei Loznitsa. DCP courtesy Atoms & Void. In Ukranian, Russian; English subtitles. 145 min.
In 2022, 10 years after his landmark film Maidan inspired much of the world to rally around Ukraine and its so-called Revolution of Dignity, a peaceful democratic uprising against the corruption and fealty shown by Viktor Yanukovych’s puppet regime toward Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Sergei Loznitsa returned to his native country and spent two years observing the harrowing effects of Russia’s full-scale invasion on Ukraine’s civilian population. The deadliest war in Europe since World War II has wrought a painful and traumatic change on the country: doubt has been cast on the moral force of nonviolence to effect justice, tolerance, and representation for all. This is writ on the grief-stricken but resolutely determined faces of the ordinary people who first faced the threat of occupation in 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and supported Russian separatist armed groups in eastern Donbass, and who now face a deeply entrenched, full-scale forever war. Loznitsa captures moments of devastation and resilience—a smoldering apartment building after a rocket attack, the distribution of food relief and medicine, the pulping of Russian literature, the return of the battle-scarred, funeral after funeral after funeral—but also moments of hope and even joyous banality: weddings, births, shops doing a brisk business, a Baptismal ice ceremony. Life that goes on because it must.