A Siege Diary - Comments & Tips

The hate against artistic solutions and hopelessness in a besieged city is simply disgusting. How did they not break if they almost resigned themselves? Yes, some were just lucky to survive. I remember my grandmother falling silent when asked. She didn't want to remember this. She and her small child were saved by her husband’s sister, who worked in the wardrobe at Smolny. From there they managed to bring scraps from the table of the city leadership, who lived completely differently. The blockade archives are still classified. It was probably worse than this trip with a camera among the living dead. Everlasting memory...

[RussianFF] It crudely shows the siege of Leningrad with an excellent B/W cinematography that shows an almost ghostly city, in which its inhabitants move like spectres. There's a clear patriotic undertone, but the director avoids being propagandistic, focusing on the hunger, cold and scarcity that people endured. The hallucinatory atmosphere is reinforced by scraps of memory that show an idyllic childhood in color.