Events & Calendars Film Screening and Discussion of "Sobytie" ("The Event")

The symposium "The End of the Cold War and the Challenges of the (Post-)Soviet World: Symposium in Honor of Professor William Taubman" will be opened with a screening of Sobytie (The Event), by Sergei Loznitsa, introduced and discussed by Mikhail Iampolskii of New York University. Before the film, Catherine Epstein, dean of the faculty, will offer her introductory remarks. This event is free and open to the public.

Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa’s documentary, The Event (Sobytie), investigates a world-changing episode in history that’ll soon celebrate its 25th anniversary: the failed 1991 coup d’etat that would finally lead to the dissolution of the USSR. Exclusively using black-and-white archive footage from the Saint Petersburg Documentary Film Studio, which was shot over the course of those few days of grand confusion, the film manages to illustrate the hopes, fears and anger of a people living through the last days and hours of the USSR while also suggesting something about the cyclical nature of history in general and Russian history in particular.