This May the award of the international federation of film critics FIPRESCI of the 65th Cannes Film Festival was given to the movie "In fog" by the director Sergey Loznitsa. This movie is a joint product of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, Germany and the Netherlands. The director lives in Germany now, and he represented Russia at the festival. However, Ukraine and, in particular, Kiev are not foreign for him. Moreover, he is the graduate of the Kiev Polytechnic Institute!
In 1981 Sergey Loznitsa, then the seventeen-year-old young man, entered KPI, studied on the faculty of control systems with the speciality of «applied mathematics», and graduated from it in 1987, having gained the diploma of the engineer-mathematician. He started to be interested in the cinema not at once - till 1991 he managed to work as the research associate in the Institute of cybernetics where he was engaged in the development of expert systems, systems of decision-making and problems of artificial intelligence. And in the early nineties, when, apparently, he had no time for science and, especially, for art when people quitted their jobs and laid a way to business, when the old values were declared as insignificant and new ones didn't take shape yet, he started to study again. And he didn’t study management practice or methods of knocking-out the debts, what he studied was the art of film, in the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography (AUSIC) in Moscow in Nanna Dzhordzhadze's workshop. After graduating from the AUSIC he shot eleven documentaries, and in 2010 he made his debut as the director of fiction films with the movie "My Happiness". This film is about the utter darkness of existence of an ordinary person in the Post-Soviet realities; at once it drew attention of critics and audience to itself and caused big polemic in the press. It was even included in the program of the Cannes Film Festival on behalf of Ukraine, but it was not noted at it. And here – a new film and long-awaited success in Cannes. The movie "In Fog" was noticed and in the territory of the CIS: in July of this year the movie also received the Grand Prix "The gold apricot" of the 9th Yerevan film festival "The Gold Apricot".
In his films Loznits acts as the director-philosopher and the scriptwriter, who tries to comprehend difficult questions of human life. But sometimes in the difficult formulating of his thoughts about human life and laws of development of a profession we can see the logic of the mathematician with paradoxical conclusions. The proof of this is at least the fragment from his article about modern cinema "The removal of obstacles" printed in the Russian magazine "The Session": "... that absolute truth, which the mankind looked for until the end of the XIX century, doesn't exist. The cinema in essence is reflexive - and therefore a priori represents someone’s subjective view. Views are crossed, the crossing of several views can make structure of the movie, but nobody will be able to guarantee that all this construction isn’t a hous of cards. On the contrary, the great mathematician of the XX century Curt Gedel in hos well-known theorem guarantees that it is a house of cards - because there is no completely closed space, which excludes the axiom that describes this space. Remove the axiom and the space will collapse. It will stop being the true. It is a vicious circle".
Not without reason he wrote in the letter to one of the lecturers in KPI (the full text of the letter is published in No. 6 of the popular science journal “The Country of Knowledge”б, this year edition): "... We live in Berlin and sometimes we remember the institute. It was a good school. Good teachers.
Very few people believe, and it helps me very much. I don't understand how it is possible to be engaged in something, without having basic mathematical education ".
... And still there is some taste of bitterness in all this. After all, since 2001 Sergey Loznitsa has lived and worked in Germany. Because in Ukraine he couldn't realize his talent: practically we have no cinema of our own, as well as film distribution. Even presented on the Cannes Film Festival in 2010 film from Ukraine "My Happiness" cannot be seen in iur country anywhere, except as on the Internet. And the mentioned above polemic round it was developed in Russian, but not in the Ukrainian mass media. What can be said about the film "In Fog" which, despite participation of Ukraine in its production, came for competition from the neighboring state. It is necessary to do something with it. We all need to do it, because those our masters who has to deal with this problem, it, seemingly, doesn't worry at all...