City Under Siege May 7, 1969

In the postwar years, many photographs and newsreels taken during the Siege were confiscated and destroyed for presenting too “subjective” a view of the events of that time. This film is the result of a long search through the Leningrad archives. Out of thousands of surviving wartime photographs, the director selected four hundred that had never before been used in cinema. The film is a montage of these historical documents, accompanied by the voices of poets Olga Berggolts and Alexander Prokofyev, radio announcer Yuri Levitan, and the sounds of air raid sirens…