Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa's acceptance speech for the France Culture prize at the Cannes Film Festival

Ladies and Gentlemen,

It is a great honour for me to receive this award. I wish to thank Mme Sandrine Treiner and her colleagues at France Culture for their appreciation of my work in cinema and support of my public standpoint.

For all of us, culture is our life’s work, and today, we find ourselves on the frontline. On the one side, those who demand to boycott Russian cinema and to “cancel” Russian culture. On the other side, those who oppose a cultural boycott.

As soon as the Russian army invaded Ukraine, I made a statement condemning the boycott of Russian cinema and Russian culture. In response, some of my own compatriots demanded to boycott my films too; in particular, the films I made about current and past wars – “Donbass”, “Maidan” and “Babi yar. Context”.

I find such a turn of events rather extraordinary. A few years ago, the same films – “Donbass” and “Maidan” – were already subjected to a ban. My films were banned in a totalitarian Russia, following FSB orders. Today, Ukrainian activists are calling for the screenings of my films to be cancelled in a democratic European Union. Regrettably, one has to admit that in this particular matter they seem to adopt the same tactics as the FSB.

Unfortunately, Cannes Film Festival also finds itself on the frontline. To my knowledge, only once in the Festival’s 75-year-long history, has its management received a letter from a head of a state film foundation demanding to withdraw a film directed by a citizen of this particular state from the official selection. It happened in 1969, and the film in question was “Andrey Rublev” by Andrei Tarkovsky.

This year, a similar incident occurred with my film “The Natural History of Destruction” produced by Germany, Lithuania and The Netherlands. Its world premiere will take place here the day after tomorrow. The film addresses an issue which has again become devastatingly relevant due to the war which Russia is waging in Ukraine: is it possible to use a civilian population and their living space as a means of war?

As it turns out, this question does not present a cause for concern to the management of the Ukrainian film foundations. Their only concern seems to be the fact that a Ukrainian citizen has dared to express an opinion, which contradicts that of the majority.

These people, “cultural activists”, are waging a war on their own front – not where the fate of Europe, contemporary civilization and, perhaps, humanity is being determined, but at the front where state building is substituted with culture wars, where knowledge of one’s own history is replaced with mythology, and where free speech is branded as foreign propaganda. The events of these past three months of war which have created a hostility towards cultural institutions: museums, theatres, cinemas, galleries, and artists themselves: directors, actors, conductors, painters, musicians – require profound reflection and serious conversation. We need to understand who benefits from this hostility.

Language is one of the fundamental categories of culture. It is through language that a person perceives the world around them. To demand a ban of a certain culture means to demand a ban of a language. A demand which is just as immoral, as it is insane. How is it possible to ban a language spoken by 350 million people all over the world?

I’m talking to you now in my native language, the one I learnt as a child in my native city of Kiev. This language is also spoken by the majority of the refugees fleeing Russian aggression in the eastern regions of Ukraine. It is in this language that the heroic defenders of Snake Island told the Russian invaders to go to hell.

Contemporary Ukraine is a multinational and a multicultural country. A call for a boycott of Russian-language culture, which constitutes an indispensable part of the heritage and cultural wealth of modern Ukraine, is deeply archaic and destructive in its nature. It also contradicts European values of cultural pluralism and freedom of expression.

Instead of employing the Russian language, the native language of 30% of the country’s population, for the country’s benefit and telling the truth about the terrible war, “cultural activists” are exhausting themselves with a Sisyphean task, trying to destroy something which is indestructible.

It seems that these people see “culture” as a simple sum of individual works of art – films, novels, plays, paintings etc. They are mistaken. Culture embraces the entire sphere of human activity, rituals and practices; the whole spectrum of ways in which we identify and express ourselves; it is our memory and the ways of its preservation and transmission. After all, culture means cultivation and development. I believe that all of you –journalists and staff of France Culture, friends and patrons of this organisation – know this perfectly well.

So, how is it possible to fight against culture? How is it possible to equate the crimes committed by the current Russian regime (not that there has been a non-criminal regime in Russia in the last hundred years) with the oeuvre of those Russian authors, more often than not living in exile and almost always seen as the prophets of sorrow in their desperate motherland, who became part and parcel of a global culture? How is it possible to demand, as a response to the violence perpetrated by Putin’s regime in Ukraine, to destroy the heritage, which has always been the antithesis of barbarity? It simply does not make sense.

The French philosopher René Girard writes: “Only someone who prevents us from satisfying a desire which he himself has inspired in us is truly an object of hatred. The person who hates first hates himself for the secret admiration concealed by his hatred. In an effort to hide this desperate admiration from others, and from himself, he no longer wants to see in his mediator anything but an obstacle. The secondary role of the mediator thus becomes primary, concealing his original function of a model scrupulously imitated.”

What is happening to us? What is happening to our culture? I believe that it is only through a serious and constructive discussion, and not through ultimatums and boycotts of various sorts, that we can come to an understanding. Since we are talking about cinema, in my opinion, the European Film Academy can become a platform for such a discussion, a pan-European conference of philosophers, anthropologists, film historians, film scholars, film directors and scriptwriters, with an aim to discuss this problem.

In his memoirs, Stefan Zweig recalls the mood of the Europeans during the First World War:

“Battles against France and Britain were fought in Berlin and Vienna, on the Ringstrasse and Friedrichstrasse, all of them considerably more agreeable battlefields than the real front. Any notices in French and English put up in shops had to be taken down, a Convent of Englischen Fräulein had to change its name because of public indignation, since it was not understood that in this context the adjective englisch meant ‘angelic’ rather than ‘English’. Modest tradesmen stuck or stamped the slogan Gott strafe England—God punish England—on their envelopes, society ladies swore never to speak a word of French again, and wrote to the newspapers saying so. Shakespeare was exiled from German theatres, Mozart and Wagner from French and British concert halls, German professors explained that Dante had really been of Germanic birth, the French claimed Beethoven as a Belgian—in fact the cultural treasures of enemy countries were unscrupulously plun- dered as if they were supplies of grain or metal ore. As if it was not enough for thousands of the peaceful citizens of those countries to be killing each other at the front daily, behind the lines the famous dead of the hostile nations, who had rested quietly in their graves for hundreds of years, were abused and vilified.”

Doesn’t it sound familiar?

I was very fortunate to have met and become friends with the great Irena Veisaitė, a Lithuanian Jew, a Kaunas ghetto survivor, a professor of Theatre studies and German literature, a long-standing collaborator of George Soros, a prominent public figure in contemporary Lithuania.

Irena once told me that during her time in the Kaunas ghetto, together with her teenage friends, she set up a German poetry group. They used to meet in secret at night and read Goethe, Heine and Schiller. “But how could you do this, when you heard the German language spoken by the Nazi monsters around you every day?” – I exclaimed in disbelief. Irena gave me a surprised look: “Yes, but what did they have to do with Goethe?”

Only a few among us are blessed with such wisdom of the soul, only a few of us are capable of displaying such profound humanity, only true heroes can afford to be so noble. However, it is our duty, the duty of those who consider culture to be their life’s work, to resist barbarity in all its forms. I’m often asked: what is an artist to do in time of war? My answer is simple - to remain sane and to protect culture.

Thank you!

Sergei Loznitsa
Cannes, 21 May 2022