Two by Sergei Loznitsa

Born in the city of Baranavichy, in what was then the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, and coming of age in Kyiv in the former Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, Sergei Loznitsa, over the last 25-plus years of his working life in both fiction and documentary film, has emerged as something like the historical conscience of Central and Eastern Europe, probing the wounds left behind by Stalin’s purges and the anarchy of the post-perestroika period, among other epoch-defining events. On the occasion of the release of Loznitsa’s latest, Two Prosecutors, the 1937-set winner of the François Chalais Prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, we’ll be welcoming the indefatigable, prolific director to Metrograph to present the US premieres of The Invasion and the accompanying short Paleontology Lesson—a pair of nonfiction films that address, with a combination of bracing immediacy and formal rigor, the turbulent recent history and uncertain future of Ukraine—alongside his contemporary classic Maidan.