Loveless – Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art

Loveless [Nelyubov], directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev, Russia / France / Belgium / Germany, 127'

• Russia is not in vogue today, and rightly so. But Andrey Zvyagintsev is one of those Russians who can acutely see the sickness of his country and its people and are able to talk about it most poignantly. 

• In Loveless, awarded at Cannes and nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Andrey Zvyagintsev creates yet another moving portrait of contemporary Russian society, this time looking at how the oppressive system affects what is most intimate and most human: the relationships between close ones.

• Whom does the director blame for the tragedy depicted on the screen?

• We will try to answer these and many other questions together with our club’s expert dr Mateusz Werner (PhD). We invite you to the screening and discussion, during which you will be able to ask questions and share your ideas on how to interpret the film. What do you think Loveless is about? We want to hear your opinion!

• Philosopher of culture, essayist, film critic, doctor of humanities. He graduated from the Faculty of Polish Studies at the University of Warsaw and the Graduate School for Social Research at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Junior Fellow of the Vienna Institute for Human Sciences. He was a guest lecturer in film studies at the Warsaw SWPS University, the National Film School in Łódź, the Faculty of Polish Studies and the Institute of Polish Culture at the University of Warsaw. He co-created programmes about film on public television: Seans filmowy [Film Séance] (Channel 2 of TVP) and Pół serio [Half Serious] (Channel 1 of TVP). For several years he managed the Film Art Gallery at the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw. In 2001-2010 he curated the film programme at the Adam Mickiewicz Institute. Editor of the quarterly journal Kronos. Currently he is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Humanities at the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw, and from 2021 he’s been the editor-in-chief of the monthly journal Twórczość. He is interested in cinema as a cognitive instrument, a stimulus for thinking and factual evidence in the trial of the visible and the invisible.