Popular reviews

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  Review by V. Lepistö ★★★★½

  My lord, it was all existing footage! Pretty much perfect editing as if Loznitsa was really there with his camera; documentary becomes cinematic fiction, cinematic fiction becomes the truth. Groups are observed in their moment, unfortunately we know better even if we are, within this film, placed very physically to the present. Still there is something in the camera that is above simple cinematic storytelling or newsreels/documenting; perhaps it is the editing that gives this film its spirit, it becomes cinema through this magical measure of crafting. Cinema truly is sculpting time and it is ultimately about very few and subtle things, realizations, that make cinema. In this sense this is really minimalism; even if there is power in the…

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  Review by Artem ★★★★½ 7

  The future belongs to crowds

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  Review by Michael Sicinski ★★★½

  [7]

  My capsule review for Cinema Scope's TIFF coverage:

  Following Maidan, last year’s impeccable the-revolution-is-live bulletin from Ukraine, Sergei Loznitsa returns to the found-footage format with which he first came to international prominence. The Event is in many respects a logical follow-up to Maidan, and attentive viewers will detect certain formal and ideological echoes. Centred on the military coup that represented the death rattle of the USSR, The Event is composed of footage from independent documentarians in the heart of what was Leningrad. As is Loznitsa’s method, we are witnessing seismic history from the street, and as with Maidan this means several things. First, we are thrust into the middle of the crowd, buffeted hither and thither, and this often…

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  Review by Edvin Eriksson ★★★★½ 2

  That Putin cameo was so creepy

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  Review by mjkowalc ★★½

  In terms of documenting events in real-time and presenting them to an audience decades later, this film is a success. The chronology is natural and captured the mood of the demonstrations, along with the relative calm felt in Leningrad during the tumultuous coup attempt that nearly altered history and saved the flagship of really existing socialism.

  However, hindsight offers more than bland platitudes about freedom and democracy. For a documentary, there is remarkably little historical context. While many of the grievances expressed by the protesters were real, capitalist Russia failed to deliver on every front and there is a great deal of nostalgia for the socialist system across the former USSR. Yeltsin (this documentary's illusive protagonist) was the most corrupt…

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  Review by supostatka ★★★

  it is so so so strange to look at those streets which are my own streets i have known since childhood and know the Event depicted only took place 4 years before i was born. the USSR seems like such a distant past because i have never known it personally, but really it was not such a long time ago. its silly, but i kept looking at the countless people in the frames, looking for my mums face - she turned 23 on that day (same age as i am now!!) and she was in the city at the time.

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  Review by el Provocateur ★★★½

  History thru film. There's a brief scene where a small group of men leave a building and enter a car that drives out. They seem like KGB. One of them is Vladimir Putin. They were.

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  Review by TheShrimp ★★★

  The Event is about is the attempted coup by a group of hardline Communists in 1991 called the gang of eight, members with high positions in the USSR.
  They were against the market-like reforms of the Perestroika and the Glasnost transparency reforms by Gorbachev that they saw as reactionary and dangerous democratization.
  It is widely accepted by historians to be part of a multitude of reasons the Soviet Union fell apart because it lead to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the KGB being disbanded and a purge of Communists and Communist activities from Russia.
  This happened alongside the '80s and '90s revolutionary waves in Communist countries and the poor economic output within the USSR before and after…

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  Review by Slappy McGee ★

  Film #224 in MY YEAR OF MUBI

  ***

  Not my bag.

  Completely dry and uninteresting TO ME.
  If you have a degree (or great interest) in RUSSIAN HISTORY then this might be enjoyable to you. Maybe, I have no idea.

  I just know that I have ZERO context for this subject and there was nothing given to us by the filmmakers to inform us of what was going on. So with no prior knowledge of this "EVENT" in history, then it is just a boring bunch of footage.

  Sorry, I can't help place this film into any better framework. Ah well.

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  Review by Zheddy ★★★½

  This film made me feel like I was a time traveller. I didn't really gain any insight to the context of the events in Leningrad, August 1991, I was just a witness.

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  Review by Graham Williamson ★★★

  I'm not sure why I gave Sergei Loznitsa another shot, but I'm quite pleased I did. The Event is about a remarkable historical moment almost forgotten outside Russia - an attempted coup by Communist hard-liners in the military, less than two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It failed, and in the short term it seemed to utterly backfire. Gorbachev officially dissolved the USSR just a month later, and he was replaced as head of state by Boris Yeltsin, who had briefly come across as statesmanlike in his opposition to the coup attempt. In retrospect, it seems like the first tremor of the discomfort with democracy that led to Putin.

  In this reading, the Communist generals might have…

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  Review by Connor Denney ★★★½

  Like Patricio Guzmán's The Battle of Chile: Part 1, the shots in The Event are always searching, looking around with an almost desperate curiosity in order to capture everything it possibly can. The footage feels constrained, as if the camera's narrow range of vision is an unfortunate damper on its ability to accurately depict the occurrences. Though perhaps a problem for historical records, this technological inhibition is no problem for the film's quality, as it captures a hurried sense of anticipation; the knowledge that something huge could happen (on- or off-camera) at any moment hangs over every moment of this film. As in Maidan, director Sergei Loznitsa is still interested with what a revolution looks like, and though he obviously had a bit more challenging job of exploring this idea in a film composed entirely of historical footage, there is certainly priority given to the appearance of the uprising rather than any clearly understood exposition.