After successfully returning to fiction filmmaking with last year’s Cannes entry Two Prosecutors, Sergei Loznitsa’s career project of exploring the history and afterlives of Soviet Russia now alights on some of his most expansive and humanist work to date. Imperium, which premiered out of competition at Venice and was just awarded Best Film in BFI London’s Official Competition (see the news), continues in the same vein as his acclaimed State Funeral and Babi Yar. Context by reconstituting old footage with originally created background sound, this time showing the USSR in its supposed early 1970s pomp, and travelling from Moscow all the way to its remotest areas and smaller republics to test questions of national unity and wider communist adoption. Forgoing the anxious tone and bleaker imagery of his prior archival docs, Loznitsa and co-editor Audinga Kučinskaitė collate the footage into an inviting panorama of Soviet life that makes us question how dominant Moscow’s power ultimately was.

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The original rushes were filmed by a crew of Italian TV documentarians, although only a small fragment of their footage was edited for broadcast on Rai. Whilst in Rome for an archival film festival, Loznitsa saw a presentation of some of the footage, realising its pertinence to his concerns about Russia’s careful control of verifiable truth, then and sadly now. He begins with an October Revolution anniversary parade in Red Square in 1973, with banners dramatically proclaiming that production targets have been exceeded. Then, Moscow life is showcased with surprising glamour and materialism: we see vast window displays of luxury goods and ornate fur coats, alongside the hubbub of a Christmas market – the first sign of many to suggest the uncertain status of religion, amidst the strong policy of state atheism.

Across the sprawling three-hour running time, the crew travels outwards from Moscow in a circular motion, first taking us into the rural decay of Suzdal, whose deprivation is encapsulated by an old woman boring a hole in the ice to wash her clothes, and further north-east to Siberia, where we glimpse derelict factories and uneasy integration between Russian workers and the territory’s indigenous Sakha people. Helped by visual transitions involving a fitting all-red flag, accompanied by the dramatic strike of a bell, we’re suddenly whisked away to Uzbekistan and Georgia, grouped together in this summary for the respective rituals of Islamic prayer and an Orthodox wedding we see. This diversity of tradition, background and culture gives further retrospective understanding of the USSR’s eventual demise: beyond its faltering economic system, it seems obvious that the various national, ethnic and linguistic groups would agitate for their own autonomy, and the centre would not hold.

As ever when Loznitsa works in this mode, not all of the footage is equally compelling, and the reliance on everyday tableaux in the various town squares risks banality, where there’s less elaboration on social circumstance and fewer details that place propaganda efforts in ironic counterpoint, compared to the Moscow- and Leningrad-set sequences. One of the more curious passages is towards the end, where a synchronised dance in a Tallinn recording studio for a TV broadcast is overlaid by Loznitsa with an Estonian version of the pop song “Stumblin’ In”, also heard in Paul Thomas Anderson’s recent Licorice Pizza. Imperium could use more of these jolts of surprise, where Loznitsa might seek more eye-catching juxtapositions and forthright evidence for his thesis, yet his patience braiding all of the geographically disparate footage results in a truly epic experience.

Imperium is a co-production involving Germany, France, Italy and Lithuania, staged by Essential Filmproduktion Gmbh, Société Parisienne de Production, Kino Produzioni and Studio Uljana Kim. Its international sales are handled by Coproduction Office.