Sergei Loznitsa, director of The Two Prosecutors, has premiered Imperium at the Venice film festival, an archive-compilation documentary built entirely from footage shot by an Italian TV crew in the Soviet Union between 1970 and 1973. Without any interviews or voiceover, the film assembles ambient scenes of everyday life across the USSR to create what the reviewer describes as a hypnotic, eerie panorama, part Potemkin village, part ethnographic study, capturing ordinary citizens who never knew they would appear in the finished work.

The footage ranges from bustling city life in Moscow, Leningrad and Kyiv, complete with shops, fashion shows and pop bands, to rural traditions in the USSR's Asian republics, including one striking pagan ritual involving a burning effigy. Loznitsa punctuates sections with a tolling bell and blood-red screen transitions, while deliberately omitting overt symbols of state control such as the gulags. The review notes the film's ambiguity, its placid, often grim tone leaves open whether it reveals quiet desperation or simply ordinary life, though it powerfully underscores the USSR's vast ethnic diversity, with children's unguarded expressions offering the clearest glimpse of genuine feeling.