Blockade

Leningrad under siege between 1941 and 1944. The film is made from footage shot at the time: people clearing snow, bodies dragged on sledges, queues, collapsing buildings, crowds walking down the middle of the street. It is not interested in military history. It is interested in daily life continuing: nobody is a hero, nobody speaks, and the camera records hunger not as an event but as an ordinary condition. The execution at the end is its only peak, and even there the crowd's reaction is not described, only shown. The form is entirely archival: the images come from the St Petersburg documentary film archive, there is no narrator, no music, and not a single line of explanation. The real intervention is in the sound. Sound designers matched the silent archive frame by frame with what the period and the action required: the screech of trams, sirens, fire hoses, footsteps, snow, distant explosions. What we see is real; what we hear has been rebuilt. Sergei Loznitsa directed. It runs 52 minutes. Who it is for: viewers interested in archival cinema, sound design and the history of the war. Who it is not for: anyone who needs context. The film explains nothing, and for a viewer who does not know the siege it remains a series of images.