DocAlliance Offers ”The Event” for Free
For two more days you will be able to watch, for free, Sergei Loznitsa’s masterly done archive film ”The Event” through the DocAlliance, ”your online documentary cinema”, a fine editorial choice for us to remember what happened in those memorable August days 25 years ago in Soviet Union. Here is the text from the DocAlliance website:
The film takes the viewers to the centre of events of the August Coup which shook the streets of Moscow between August 19 and 21, 1991. It was launched by the conservative branch of the Communist Party which frowned upon Gorbachev’s attempts at transforming the USSR. His political and economic reforms, known as perestroika and glasnost, aimed to create a federation of independent republics with a common president and political vision, finally led to Gorbachev’s short removal from the presidential post. However, the group of politicians who called themselves “The State Committee on the State of Emergency” did not gain the support of armed forces while the citizens of Moscow significantly resisted their attempt. They took to the streets, forming mass gatherings requiring the dissolution of the USSR and the formation of democratic Russia. As proved by the later course of events, it was the August Coup that helped install Boris Yeltsin as the political leader of the country and led to the final dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991.
And here is a quote from what I wrote when I watched the film at DOKLeipzig:
… Loznitsa is not in Moscow in this film, he is in Leningrad and gives me exceptional material from what happened in the streets and the squares, that I love so much today, where people gathered to try to understand what is going on. + he gives me the legendary mayor Sobchak and his impressive speeches, “the sea of faces” listening to him, the USSR flag being substituted by the Russian, the slogans used like “fascism will not prevail”, bring the “coup gang to justice” and the name of Yeltsin shouted again and again. Fascinating…
