Capital Celluloid 2012 - Day 291: Thu Oct 18

In The Fog (Loznitsa, 2012): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 3.15pm
This film also screens at Vue 5 in Leicester Square on Wed 17 at 6pm. Details here.

56th LONDON FILM FESTIVAL (10-21 October 2012) DAY 9

Every day (from October 10 to October 21) I will be selecting the London Film Festival choices you have a chance to get tickets for and the movies you are unlikely to see in London very soon unless you go to see them at the Festival. Here is the LFF's main website for the general information you need. Don't worry if some of the recommended films are sold out by the time you read this as there are always some tickets on offer which go on sale 30 minutes before each screening. Here is the information you need to get those standby tickets.


Time Out review:
'Having made documentaries for more than a decade, in 2010 the Belarussian director Sergei Loznitsa attracted a lot of critical attention with his impressive first feature, ‘My Joy’, an unremittingly bleak look at contemporary Russia. With the likewise sombre but in other respects rather more conventional ‘In the Fog’, Loznitsa looks set to garner even more praise.

Set in Belarus in 1942, the film begins with a lengthy travelling shot (the first of only 70 or so shots in the movie), which ends with the Nazis hanging Belarussian resistance fighters. It then proceeds to chronicle what happens after two partisans arrive at the house of a comrade widely believed (since he alone was freed by the Nazis after a train was sabotaged) to have betrayed the executed men. He protests his innocence, but they are no more persuaded by his claims than his wife, and they take him through the forest, hoping to avoid discovery by the German forces patrolling the district.

Not unlike Nicholas Ray’s likewise philosophical ‘Bitter Victory’, ‘In the Fog’ is a war movie that foregrounds the emotions of individuals over the spectacle of battle, and uses metaphor and a calm mood of ethical enquiry rather than simplistic polemics arguing for or against military engagement. Loznitsa knows that war exists and won’t go away; rather than indulging in patriotic or pacifistic platitudes, he tries to show what it might do to our souls. And, in this writer’s opinion, he succeeds.'
Geoff Andrew

Here is the trailer.

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