Victory Day (День Победы). 2018. Germany. Written and directed by Sergei Loznitsa. DCP courtesy Atoms & Void. In Russian, German; English subtitles. 94 min.
Each year on May 9 people gather in Treptower Park in Berlin to commemorate the victory of the Soviet Union over Nazi Germany. Some of them are decorated veterans in full military regalia, others show up wearing the menacing black leather uniforms of the Russian nationalist motorcycle club Night Wolves Karelia. They give speeches about sacrifice and martyrdom, lay flowers at the tomb monument of the Soviet soldier, dance to folk songs about mothers who mourn their dead sons in the Great Patriotic War, pin the controversial fire-and-gunpowder ribbon of St. George to their lapels, and pine for the rebirth of a fallen Soviet empire. In 2018, Serge Loznitsa filmed this ceremonial gathering, a tradition that had continued for 72 years, against the backdrop of an intensifying Russian-Ukrainian war that was threatening to erupt beyond eastern Donbas together with the rising success of the populist far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD), which had recently entered the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, for the first time as the third-largest overall party. Loznitsa opens and closes the film with the famous Soviet wartime folk ballad “Beri shinel’, poshli domoy” (“Take Your Greatcoat, Let’s Go Home”), in which the songwriters Bulat Okudzhava and Valentin Levashov conclude, “No use in yesteryear glory.”