Imperium Review: Ordinary Life Beneath an Imperial Myth

The most unsettling thing about an archive is that everyone inside it is alive. They walk through Moscow streets, wait beneath shop windows, dance at weddings, wash clothes in winter water, sing, work, stare into the lens. Children sometimes hold the camera’s gaze longer than adults do, their faces still open enough to suggest that something private might slip through. It never quite does. Sergei Loznitsa’s Imperium brings these people remarkably close, then reminds us that closeness is not knowledge. We can study their expressions for hours and still know almost nothing about what they believed, feared, or expected from the years ahead.

Loznitsa builds the film from footage shot by Italian crews across the Soviet Union between 1970 and 1973. There are no present-day interviews explaining what became of the people on screen, and no voiceover organizing their lives into a clean historical argument. Restored 16mm images, reconstructed sound, red interstitial screens, and the recurring toll of a bell turn the material into something stranger than a survey of Soviet society. The film feels like a country briefly summoned back into existence.

Moscow initially offers the empire in the language it preferred for itself. A parade connected to the 24th Party Congress fills Red Square with banners announcing production targets achieved ahead of schedule. Elsewhere, GUM windows display polished shoes, evening clothes, handbags, objects arranged as evidence of metropolitan confidence. A photo exhibition presents Soviet citizens from different regions as members of one enormous collective body. The state is eager to describe itself. The camera keeps finding lives that resist being reduced to that description.

An elderly woman washes clothes through an opening in the ice at Suzdal. Winter fairs carry customs older than the Soviet state. Reindeer sleds move through Siberia. Camel races take place near the Mongolian border. Weddings unfold according to local traditions. Worship continues in mosques and churches despite official atheism. Marxist slogans remain visible at agricultural festivals, yet the rituals taking place beneath them seem to belong to a calendar and memory that political doctrine never entirely possessed.

This is where Imperium becomes quietly devastating. Power tends to imagine itself as permanent because it can rename places, hang portraits, rewrite institutions, and demand public declarations of loyalty. Human beings are less obedient at the level of habit. A song survives. A prayer survives. A language remains in use. A wedding repeats gestures learned before the current flag existed.

The contradiction is especially sharp when the film moves through territories far from Moscow. In Siberia, young ethnic Russians play guitar and sing while members of the local Yakut population watch from the edges. It is an ordinary scene, almost casual, yet the placement of bodies inside the frame gives it political weight. Elsewhere, Ukrainian speech, Islamic worship in Bukhara, Christianity in Etchmiadzin, Georgian dance, throat singing, local festivals, and village rituals persist under a political structure that insists on unity. Loznitsa does not need to announce the colonial pressure. He lets the image hold it.

Still, resistance is too simple a word for much of what we see. People may not be performing defiance. They may simply be living. That distinction matters. Imperium is strongest when it refuses to convert every surviving custom into heroic opposition. People cook, pray, marry, repair things, gather for festivals, teach children, and return to work. Political systems build monuments to permanence while ordinary continuity happens somewhere else.

Loznitsa’s treatment of sound deepens the unease. Some of what we hear has been reconstructed or supplied where synchronous recordings were unavailable. A Tallinn dance sequence is accompanied by an Estonian version of “Stumblin’ In,” a song released later than the footage itself. The apparent immediacy is therefore partly fabricated, yet the fabrication makes the past feel physically nearer. Footsteps land with weight. Crowds murmur. Snow seems audible beneath shoes. History becomes present tense for a few seconds at a time.

The effect is especially powerful because the people onscreen do not know what the audience knows. The Soviet Union will disappear. Borders will change. Some of these republics will become independent states. Political relationships visible here will harden into later conflicts. None of that knowledge exists inside the image. A man walking through Leningrad snow is simply walking through Leningrad snow.

The recurring red screens and tolling bell give that gap between lived time and historical knowledge a funeral rhythm. The device could have become heavy-handed, but its repetition gradually feels less like commentary on a state than on time itself. Each new location appears complete and inhabited, then vanishes into red before another takes its place. People continue moving while the structure containing them approaches an ending they cannot see.

At 175 minutes, this method also begins to test the viewer. The breadth is necessary to the film’s conception, yet accumulation does not always deepen meaning. Streets, workshops, ceremonies, crowds, labor, and landscapes occasionally follow one another without producing fresh tension. The cotton sequence is stronger because it has its own internal movement, following material from harvest through processing and toward clothing and display. Other passages remain looser, and the distinction between immersion and fatigue becomes difficult to ignore.

Even that fatigue carries something appropriate to the film. Imperium refuses the compressed efficiency through which history is usually consumed. It gives us time spent waiting, watching, crossing distances, looking at faces that will never explain themselves. The empire suggested by the title appears enormous, administrative, almost impossibly durable. What survives most vividly is smaller: a child’s stare, an old woman beside winter water, bodies dancing at a wedding, crowds trudging through snow.

The political structure vanished while these gestures remained in the archive. Loznitsa can restore the grain of an image and rebuild the sound around it, but he cannot return the interior life of the person standing inside the frame. That absence remains untouched. Imperium leaves us with the strange privilege of seeing people who cannot answer us, inhabitants of a vanished world who remain, for a moment, frighteningly present.

Imperium had its world premiere out of competition at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival on September 5, 2026. Constructed entirely from archival footage filmed across the Soviet Union between 1970 and 1973, the documentary offers a sweeping visual record of diverse cultures spanning from the Arctic to Central Asia.

Full Credits

• Title: Imperium

• Distributor: Coproduction Office

• Release date: September 5, 2026 (Venice International Film Festival)

• Running time: 2 hours 56 minutes (176 minutes)

• Director: Sergei Loznitsa

• Writers: Sergei Loznitsa

• Producers and Executive Producers: Uljana Kim, Philippe Bober, Giovanni Pompili, Anne-Claire Martin, Luca Ricciardi

• Cast: Archive footage

• Editors: Audinga Kučinskaitė, Sergei Loznitsa