The RSW Fall 2021 Film Series, Power, Poetics, and Play: Documenting Soviet Legacies, will screen State Funeral, a 2019 documentary directed by Sergei Loznitsa.

State Funeral chronicles the four days leading up to the funeral of Joseph Stalin with footage of the millions of mourners who flocked to Moscow to pay their respects following the death of the leader of the Soviet Union.

A MESMERIZING, two-hour assemblage fashioned from archival material…, Sergei Loznitsa’s State Funeral is both awesome and stupefying, conjuring the spectacle of a dead pharaoh laid to rest in a celluloid pyramid of his own design.
J Hoberman, Artforum

The Ukrainian-born filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa both wrote and directed this film, and he will join us virtually after the screening for a discussion and Q&A. IU Professor Joshua Malitsky will moderate the session, and Professor Lilya Kaganovsky (University of Illinois) will also join the discussion via Zoom.

Sponsored by the Robert F. Byrnes Russian and East European Institute, Russian Studies Workshop (RSW) and the IU Center for Documentary Research and Practice.