At MoMA, the Films of Sergei Loznitsa Confront the Soviet Past

The Museum of Modern Art recently hosted the North American premiere of Sergei Loznitsa’s “Imperium” in conjunction with the first stateside retrospective dedicated to the Ukrainian filmmaker. Mr. Loznitsa began his days as a mathematician working at Kyiv’s Institute of Cybernetics. After several years of tech development, he traveled to Moscow to study at the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography. Though Mr. Loznitsa makes fiction films, he began as a documentarian, often employing archival footage and constructing it “brick by brick . . . always following the internal logic of the images.”