General Admission:$18 | Belcourt Members: $12
Chapters 1-3: Crackdown (199 min. +10 min. intermission) | 10 min. intermission | Chapters 4-5: First Week Of War (125 min.)
Programmers Note: In addition to viewing the film in one sitting (as intended), the ticket buyer also has the option to see Chapters 1-3 on Wednesday at 5:30pm, then Chapters 4-5 on Thursday at 5:30pm (based on ticket availability.) Note that there are limited tickets available for all screenings.
Soviet-born American filmmaker Julia Loktev (THE LONELIEST PLANET, DAY NIGHT DAY NIGHT) came to Moscow in 2021 to make a film about independent journalists being declared “foreign agents” by Putin’s regime — as it turns out, just four months before Russia started a full-scale war in Ukraine. With her friend Anna Nemzer, a talk show host at TV Rain, Russia’s last remaining independent news channel, Loktev brings us into a community of sharp, warm and funny young women speaking truth to power as they face increasing threats. Loktev filmed in Moscow during the first week of the full-scale invasion, as the journalists tried to counter Russian propaganda and report the truth on the war — until all independent media was shut down and they were forced to flee the country. Structured in five chapters, feeling like a cross between a Russian novel and a reality show about frighteningly real reality, Loktev’s film is an extraordinary historic record of a country on the verge of fascism and an immersive and intimate inside view of the opposition in an authoritarian society, which becomes all the more globally relevant every day.
“Yes, I know that is a substantial commitment of time. Hear me out. I’m trying to avoid hyperbole, but I don’t know how else to say this: It is perhaps the most essential investment of time you can make in a movie theater this year. And yet it is not just ‘important’ or consequential — it is brilliant, riveting, vital, devastating.” —Alissa Wilkinson, NYT Critic’s Pick, New York Times “An astonishing epic of uncertainty, anxiety, and despair, and of defiant, illogical hope—and Loktev, a filmmaker of exacting patience, hurries none of it along…. Loktev’s accomplishment in this extraordinarily human cinematic document is to simply keep filming — to cling fast to her camera, and to keep it focussed on the remarkable sight of young people showing exemplary courage.” —Justin Chang, New Yorker “Loktev’s careful approach lets the water rise to a boil slowly…. It gives the project an intimacy that a more over-directed project would have lacked. The decision to take her time with these people and not rush from one major event to another gives Loktev’s film depth on a macro level, but it also hides what a deceptively brilliant filmmaker she is on a micro level. Where she places her camera, the news clips she chooses to include, how she gives her subjects space and grace — it’s all carefully considered.” —Brian Tallerico, rogerebert.com “This is one of the most engrossing movies, fiction or nonfiction, that I've seen all year…. Five-and-a-half hours may sound like a commitment, but once this movie has begun, you won't want to leave. And you'll be as eager as I am, by the end, to see what lies ahead for these intrepid souls in Part II.” —Justin Chang, NPR
