Issue 78 (2022) |
Maksim Brius, Mikhail Vasserbaum: Hotsunlight (Solntsepek, 2021) reviewed by Greg Dolgopolov © 2022 |
Hotsunlight (or Sunbaked) is a good example of the Russian “firehose of falsehood” propaganda playbook. It is one of a very small number of Russian-made films (e.g., Renat Davletyarov’s Donbass. Okraina, 2019) that are set in May 2014 in the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic. This is a brutal war film that provides neither an especially romanticized view of the conflict, nor any deep insights. While Hotsunlight did not get a mainstream theatrical release, its trailer has attracted considerable views and, perhaps more importantly, has been discussed extensively on social media and provoked several YouTube videos that scrutinize its version of history. It is not necessarily a film that anyone would want to see or review. But in order to understand the seemingly absurd motivations for Russia’s senseless invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, it is worth trying to examine its propaganda tactics devised to prime Russian audiences for rationalizing the invasion by re-examining the events of 2014 or how they have been shaped by the filmmakers.
The film’s narrative is purposefully confusing. For an action thriller it is hard to tell the good guys from the baddies. Apart from some caricatured nationalists wearing a vyshyvanka, they all look and sound the same. The setting is the Luhansk region in May 2014. It is a hot, sunny day when a few cars loaded with some armed ne’er-do-wells stop in a village. They proceed to murder the villagers, rape the women, brutally bash a baby into a wall and steal some watches. The Novozhilov family, on their way to visit friends in Russia, get caught up in this mayhem and barely escape the marauders. On the way, they pick up a young girl whose entire family has been slaughtered. When they eventually get into town, it is clear that there is a major conflict going on, but the belligerents are still not well-defined. The borders are closed, there is no way out. Vlad Novozhilov (Aleksandr Bukharov) is questioned by Gritsai (played by Aleksei Kravchenko, best known for his role as Flera in Elem Klimov’s Come and See [Idi i smotri, 1985], in which the atrocities he witnesses during the war make the child’s face transform into that of an old man), the military leader of the separatists. It turns out that they both fought in Afghanistan, but Vlad knows the horrors of war and has no appetite to experience them again. So, he enlists as a paramedic driver to help with the fatalities. The setting highlights the incongruities of war: merciless bloodshed against beautiful blue skies and fertile fields just waiting to be harvested. But for some strange reason, the Ukrainian army shells the fields and their own villages indiscriminately. This anticipates the pro-Russian media accusations of 2022 and their strange assertions that Ukrainians indiscriminately bomb their own territory.
Elsewhere volunteers from all over Ukraine are heading to special training camps to learn combat techniques. These young men are getting ready to take up arms, although it is not clear whom they want to fight. They are on an emotional high after the dynamic changes precipitated by the Kyiv Maidan and want to take action. Meanwhile in Luhansk there is more carnage and Vlad’s teenage son, convinced that it would be treason to leave his homeland, decides to join the regional defenders. Vlad is forced to confront tough moral challenges because around him everything that is beautiful and sacred is destroyed and covered in blood. There is mayhem everywhere perpetrated by the marauders, the national battalion of volunteers, the Ukrainian army and local pro-Russian separatists such as the bespectacled schoolteacher Gurevich (Vladimir Il’in) who has lost all his children in a bomb blast and is now motivated to join the separatist soldiers even though he has no combat experience.
The audience is encouraged to sympathize with the pro-Russian separatists as the conflict is viewed from their perspective. And yet there is confusion—everyone speaks Russian. The opposing sides share a common history and many served together in Afghanistan. The experience of confusion is endemic to war films, but, traditionally, not typical of Russian war films that have a long history of being schematic. And yet, on this occasion, confusion works well because it is in keeping with the overall strategy of the “firehose of falsehood”.
This contemporary Russian model for propaganda has three distinctive features outlined by a 2016 Rand Corporation study: rapid, extensive, discontinuous media content; numerous platforms and channels that undermine informational hierarchy and authority; narrative confusion and a shamelessness when it comes to telling and retelling big lies (Paul & Matthews 2016). In the words of one observer who may have been anticipating Hotsunlight, “[N]ew Russian propaganda entertains, confuses and overwhelms the audience” (Bertolin 2015, 10). Not sure about entertainment, but Hotsunlight certainly overwhelms the audience with copious explosions and narrative confusion. Technically it is well-made and the performances are generally convincing, but the film is also a textbook approach to corporate propaganda promoting the mercenary private Wagner army. The IMDb rating is not kind: 4.7/10 out of 422 reviews.
The critical responses are diametrically opposed. According to respected film critic Viktor Matizen, Hotsunlight ranks first in terms of aggressiveness and use of caricatures when compared to the twenty or so war films that use anti-Ukrainian invectives. In examining the film as part of Russia’s information war, Matizen (2021) notes the lack of motivation for the brutality of the killings. In one of the many YouTube videos (boasting 150,000 views) pointing out the film’s errors, Aleksei Petrov, an officer with the Ukrainian Armed Force, calls the film “propaganda trash.” Petrov (2021) argues passionately that the film begins with a lie when the titles at the start of the film state: “in Kyiv the government was overthrown.” He explains what happened in February 2014 and how the entire process was legal. Petrov then points out another lie asserted by the filmmakers, namely that the Ukrainian army was supported by “volunteer battalions, a large part of which were composed of hardened criminals, marauders and nationalists” and that a “general and far-reaching genocide of the Russian nation had begun.” He explains that more than 70 per cent of those battalions were Russian-speaking and that there was absolutely no genocide: “the notion of the truth and this film are completely incompatible.” Finally, he lists numerous caricatures employed in the film, as well as its many factual errors.
Dmitrii Sosnovskii, a reviewer in the government newspaper Rossiiskaia gazeta, called Hotsunlight “a film that is impossible to watch, but that one has to watch.” It is also a “heartbreaking film” that shows the war “in all its ugliness, without edits, without unnecessary sentimentality, with ruthless, simply unbearable frankness, as a reliable story about what happened to Russians at the very borders of the Russian Federation” (Sosnovski 2021). Military commentator Evgenii Poddubnyi, who claims to have visited the Donetsk region at the time when the action takes place, argues that the film is far removed from reality because “reality is far more terrifying.” However, he then makes a cinematic comparison suggesting that “since Balabanov is no longer with us, this [film] will need to suffice” (Epoddubny 2021). He acknowledges the weakness of some of the dialogue and admits that there is “an element of caricature amongst the antagonists, but […] the narrative, ideas and ideology are far more important.” He notes that, “despite the abundance of violent scenes and tragic outcomes, blood and shit, the film teaches forgiveness, responsibility and decency, the film teaches not to betray, but to protect.” Poddubnyi maintains that in the film “good overcomes evil, whatever that evil appears to be concealed by. It’s as simple as that.” What Poddubnyi overlooks is that in this conflict, the identifiers of good and evil are incredibly confused and there appears to be no forgiveness, but only a stimulus for future retribution.
There are several key conversations between Vlad, the former Afghan vet-turned-ambulance driver; Goncharenko, now fighting for the Ukrainian volunteers; and Gritsai, who fought in Afghanistan and is now in command of the Separatists. All these conversations are consciousness-raising in some form for the viewer—addressing a conceptual aspect of the conflict. For example, Vlad and Gritsai are standing on a flight of stairs in the local command center, smoking. Vlad is trying to make sense of the bombing of a primary school which only one teacher, Gurevich, has survived: “There is just one thing that I can’t understand. Why are they shooting up the villages? There is no one there other than civilians.” Gritsai gruffly explains the Ukrainians’ tactic. “They do this to horrify the civilian population so as to set them against us. It was used in the Great Patriotic War by the Nazi police so that civilians wouldn’t help the partisans, and, at the same time, all sorts of riffraff have come crawling out.” This brief scene characterizes the Ukrainian forces as malevolent and savage war criminals that replicate the Nazi techniques of terrorizing the civilian population. It is designed to reinforce the image of Ukrainians as associated with the Nazis in the minds of the Russian audiences.
In perhaps the most powerful scene of the film, Vlad has a heated exchange with his teenage son who tells him that he wants to stay and defend his motherland. Vlad passionately explains to him what war is:
Stop! Seen a few war films then, eh? Do you know what war is? It is not romantic and it’s not heroic deeds. War is fear. Fear is not thinking that you will be wounded or killed. If you are wounded, you will feel pain, but you won’t feel fear! If you are killed, you will feel nothing. Fear is when around you your mates are being killed and you can’t to do anything and it is impossible to get used to that. Is that clear!?
It is a powerful scene, emotional and manipulative, especially as the boy is later killed in an indiscriminate bombing. This forces Vlad to face what he most fears—war. The whole film is about one man’s resistance to taking up arms and how circumstances wear him down and force his hand. In the end, Vlad finds salvation only by picking up a gun and walking with his comrades in a field towards a future war. Hotsunlight is a textbook example of blunt film propaganda with ratcheted-up emotions and the senseless murder of children. Connections to the truth or real events are not as important as the ideology of shaping a motivation for war.
The two directors, Maksim Brius and Mikhail Vasserbaum, are best known for their careers in television mini-series about crime (for example, Brius made several episodes for Office Rat [Kantseliarskaia krysa. Bolshoi peredel, 2019]; Vasserbaum directed episodes of Nevskii [2017–20]). They have a background in action movies and no-holds-barred brutality with some unsentimental dramatic connections. There were rumors that the film was financed by Evgenii Prigozhin, also known as ‘Putin’s Chef’ and head of the private military Wagner Group (Sauer 2022; Meduza 2021). Moreover, Hotsunlight was produced by Sergei Shcheglov, who was also responsible for The Tourist (Turist, dir. Andrei Batov [real name: Shcherbinin], 2021) about Russia’s military support in the Central African Republic, and for the trilogy Shugalei (dir. Denis Neimand, 2020), a hard-boiled action thriller about a mild-mannered Russian scientist imprisoned by Libyan terrorists. All these films share a murky national, secret-service throughline that would be worth investigating further, as the Wagner Group featured in all these real conflicts and their cinematic representations. The trailer for the film was released at the end of July 2021, and the film premiered theatrically on 11 August but did not enjoy a long theatrical run as, according to The Insider:“the film lacked two factors: audience demand and official pressure” (Matizen 2021). The film moved to a number of streaming services and was then released on free-to-air NTV on 18 August.
While it remains unclear whether Prigozhin and the Wagner Group supplied any funding for the film, the filmmakers make a tongue-in-cheek gesture to promote the organization anyway. It is unclear if “ordinary” viewers are supposed to grasp this message. The bespectacled school teacher who lost all of his children in a bomb-blast spends all his time clutching a little brown-paper covered hardback. It is only at the moment of his predictable sacrificial death on the battlefield that we learn the title of the book. An unidentified squad of “polite people” in uniform discover his lifeless body. The commander picks up this little book, opens it and is surprised that the school-teacher was reading Richard Wagner’s essay “On the Essence of German Music.” The commander pockets the book, saying that he will read it in his leisure as the heavily armed men with Vlad now among them in full camouflage walk through the high wheat grass into a promisingly bright future—with Wagner’s music completing a glorious soundtrack. The idealized advertisement for the Wagner mercenary group—that out of chaos comes order—and that it is these men who will bring both equipment and calm to the madness that has befallen the Donbas region. The chaos thrown up by the “firehose of falsehood” is resolved in the conclusion, where the film offers two strong denouement motifs: the romance of the Wagner Group and Vlad gaining consciousness through war. This is a call to arms for audiences who, like Vlad, have for years resisted turning to warfare. Seen from the perspective of September 2022 and Russian Federation soldiers’ lack of motivation, despite the textbook approach, this film clearly did not have the desired propaganda effect.
Greg Dolgopolov
University of NSW, Sydney
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Works Cited
Bertolin, Giorgio. 2015. “Conceptualizing Russian Information Operations: Info-War and Infiltration in the Context of Hybrid Warfare.” IO Sphere.
Epoddubnyi. 2021. Telegram 13 August.
Matizen, Viktor. 2021. “A babusyu- toporom.” Victor Matizen about the propagandistic tactics in Solntsepek’. The Insider, 25 August.
Meduza. 2021. “Eto takaia shiza kontsentrirovannaia. Luganskaia reznia benzopiloi.” Meduza 12 August.
Paul, Christopher; Matthews, Miriam. 2016. “The Russian ‘Firehose of Falsehood’ Propaganda Model: Why It Might Work and Options to Counter It.” RAND Corporation.
Petrov, Aleksei. 2021. “Tresh! Fil’m ‘Solntsepek’ glazami ofitsera VSU!” YouTube 23 August.
Sauer, Pjotr, 2022. “Putin Ally Yevgeny Prigozhin admits founding Wagner mercenary group.” The Guardian 26 September.
Sosnovski, Dmitrii. 2021. “Chto v kino: ‘Solntsepek’, ‘Ne dyshi 2’, ‘Glavnyi geroi’, Allen Skorseze…” Rossiiskaia gazeta 13 August.
Hotsunlight, Russia, 2021
Color, 133 minutes
Directors: Maksim Brius, Mikhail Vasserbaum
Scriptwriter: Vladimir Izmailov
DoP: Vladislav Gurchin, Aleksandr Polagaev, Garik Zhamgarian, Dmitrii Aref’ev
Editing: Vladimir Bezzubchenko
Music: Vitalii Mukaniaev
Production Design: Aleksandr Kotikov, Dmitrii Tselikov
Cast: Vladimir Il’in, Aleksandr Bukharov, Aleksei Kravchenko, Maksim Dakhnenko, Marina Denisova
Creative Producer: Genrikh Ken
Producers: Sergei Shcheglov, Aleksandr Koldakov
Production: Paritet
Maksim Brius, Mikhail Vasserbaum: Hotsunlight (Solntsepek, 2021) reviewed by Greg Dolgopolov © 2022 |