A striking visual journey through the vast expanse of the Soviet Union, built entirely from long-forgotten archival footage shot between 1970 and 1973 by Italian filmmakers. From Arctic shores to Central Asian deserts, from the Carpathians to the Pacific, the film reveals a rich tapestry of cultures the Soviet state sought to standardize. Beginning in Moscow and gradually approaching remote villages where centuries-old traditions still thrived, exposing the decreasing weight of centralized power. Without voice-over or commentary, the images themselves reveal a profound paradox: an empire projecting unity while ruling over profoundly heterogeneous worlds.
Sergei Loznitsa
He was born in 1964 in present-day Belarus and grew up in Kyiv, Ukraine. He graduated in Applied Mathematics from the Kyiv Polytechnic before studying Directing at the Russian State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) in Moscow. He has been making films since 1996, and by now he has directed 25 award-winning documentaries and 4 fiction films. He made his feature film debut with ‘My Joy’ (2010), premiered in the Official Section of the Cannes Film Festival, where he would return with ‘In the Fog’ (2012, Fipresci Award), ‘Maidan’ (2014), ‘A Gentle Creature’ (2017), ‘Donbass’ (2018, best director in Un Certain Regard), ‘Babi Yar. Context’ (2021, special mention of the Golden Eye Award), ‘The Natural History of Destruction’ (2022), ‘The Invasion’ (2024) and ‘Two Prosecutors’ (2025), the latter of which won the FIPRESCI Prize at Seminci. His non-fiction feature films ‘The Event’ (2015), ‘Austerlitz’ (2016), ‘The Trial’ (2018), ‘State Funeral’ (2019) and ‘Imperium’ (2026) were presented at the Special Screenings of the Venice Film Festival. In 2013, he founded the film production company Atoms & Void.
DIRECTOR
Sergei Loznitsa
SCREENPLAY
Sergei Loznitsa
EDITOR
Danielius Kokanauskis, Sergei Loznitsa
SOUND
Vladimir Golovnitskiy
MUSIC
Vladimir Tarasov
PRODUCTION COMPANY
Essential Filmproduktion GmbH, Société Parisienne de Production, Rai Cinema, Studio Uljana Kim
