KinoKultura: Issue 80 (2023) |
Russia’s war on Ukraine has changed everything, as in the wider world, so in Artdocfest. This is evident not only superficially with the rebranding of the festival advertising from its traditional white on red to blue on yellow in homage to the Ukrainian flag, but also in its permanent relocation to Riga, and of course every aspect of its program. Previously, with screenings in Moscow and St Petersburg, Russia’s biggest festival of documentary film and now the largest documentary film festival located in the territory of the former USSR, Artdocfest is now permanently located in Riga alone, after three years in which it existed partially in Russia and partially in Riga. The move has led to a refocusing of the festival from its previous orientation towards Russian-language films or films about Russia to “an emphasis on documentary films from the Baltic Sea region as well as from other Eastern European countries and former USSR territory” (Rules and Regulations). Commentary on and condemnation of Russia’s war is also evident in all four of the festival programs: the two competitive sections, Baltic Focus and Artdocfest Open, and the non-competitive ones, War Before War and Artdoc and Proart, as well as, self-evidently, in its closing film, Eastern Front (dir. Vitalii Manskii and Yevhen Tytarenko, 2023). It is also a major theme in the parallel online program Artdocnet, which proclaims itself to be the festival’s only Russian language program (in fact, some of the films are also in Belarusian) and enables Russian viewers (who have VPNs) to watch films now that the festival has relocated from Russia.
The main competitive part of the festival, Artdocfest Open, comprised 17 films and is overwhelmingly focused on the present day and on the war, as well as the descent of Russia and Belarus into every greater authoritarianism and political repression. As festival president Vitalii Manskii (2023) put it, the war “has created new conditions for documentary filmmakers, who are invited to help us understand the meaning of the events unfolding in the Here and Now.” Probably the most direct example of such a striving to reflect upon the events of the war was the film When Spring Came to Bucha (dir. Mila Teshaieva and Marcus Lenz, 2022), filmed in the aftermath of the liberation of the Ukrainian town, the name of which has become synonymous with Russian war crimes and violence inflicted against the Ukrainian civilians. Unlike the widely screened news reports, Teshaieva and Lenz’s film provides no voice-over commentary or brisk montage of events, but talks at some length to the townspeople and establishes a slower, more reflective pace, charting the process of a town coming to terms with the violence inflicted on it, seeking to record the crimes and identify the dead, reforge relations with neighbors and slowly to rebuild and look to the future.
Many of the films in this program related to the war indirectly. This is particularly evident in the film that won the main prize, Manifesto, which was also the first Russian film to win IDFA Amsterdam since Viktor Kossakovskii’s The Belovs (Belovy, 1993). This is an anonymous film, made under the incognito Angie Vinchito, entirely compiled from social media footage made by or of school-age children, starting with them getting up and going to school, before they are interrupted by a nuclear attack drill siren. The film then shows teachers screaming at and hitting the students, sexual abuse of students by their teachers, and attempts to react to the teachers’ political indoctrination. The students’ reactions are shown in a number of small acts of subversion, such as taking down or denigrating the ubiquitous portrait of president Putin or arguing that the annexation of Crimea has made Russia a pariah state. The final sequences show an escalation of these reactions in school shootings, followed by images of FSB arrests, and end with the video blog of two provincial teenagers who play truant from school, get high, find weapons and start firing at the police and then commit suicide together. While the footage at times is of a single individual, the skillful editing succeeds in expanding from it to create an image of a generation of children, brutalized and politically manipulated, whose reactions and resistance seem doomed to come to nothing. When this film is seen alongside the film which won the Grand Prix in 2021, Silent Voice (Tikhii golos, dir. Reka Valerik, 2020), made by a director using a pseudonym, about the persecution of gay people in Chechnia, and the film Voices: Where is My Country? (Galasy. Dze moi krai, Docwave artel 2022), an anonymous Belarusian documentary which is part of the Artdocnet program and depicts the Free Belarusian Choir's activities as part of the Belarusian opposition movement, and other shorter anonymous films in the Artdocnet program, it would appear that pseudonymous films represent a potentially important new tendency in Russian and Belarusian documentary permitting independent documentary to survive in the increasingly repressive climate in those countries. Indeed, Manskii has expressed surprise that there are not more Russian anti-war films being made and entered for the Artdocfest competition under Radio Free Europe’s Priznaki zhizni rubric (Fanailova 2023).
While the repressive consequences are clearly a huge part of the explanation, the festival still strives to provide a platform for Russian films and filmmakers, rather than boycotting Russian culture in response to the invasion, for instance as called for by the Ukrainian Minister of Culture (Higgins 2022). While it took the decision in 2020 not to permit any films financed by the Russian state or Russian-state affiliated structures (such as Gazprom), the festival pitching’s funding call stipulates that:
We take responsibility to support independent artists from countries where people with authoritarian tendencies are in power, even more so from countries where people with authoritarian tendencies are in power. But we are ready to support only those auteurs who, with their works, are ready to reflect real life without censorship and without compromises. (“Pitching Artdocfest/Riga”)
This means that many of the films made by Russian filmmakers, about Russia and in Russian, were financed internationally. It may perhaps also mean more anonymous films in future. Certainly, it is impossible to imagine a film such as Anna Shishova’s The New Greatness Case (Novoe velichie, 2022) being made in today’s Russia. This is a film about the case against Anna Pavlikova, a 15-year-old girl who was arrested in 2018 after being caught up in an internet chat group that became a political organization called New Greatness. What is particularly chilling about this case is that most of the group’s activities were instigated by undercover FSB officers, presumably for reasons of career advancement. The film depicts the workings of the Russian justice system, from entrapment, forced confessions, harsh prison conditions, and the mental deterioration of the accused, ending with prison sentences of six to seven years for these young people. While it is difficult to imagine a film like this being made in Russia in the future, it grants an insight into the kinds of treatment that now awaits anyone voicing criticism of the war or the regime. A film on a similar theme, of Russian repression of opposition, The Khabarovsk Carousel (Khabarovskaia karusel’, dir. Timur Ogai, 2022) was shown in the Artdocnet program: as with most of the films in this section, the subject matter was politically important, but the filmmaking was less artistically ambitious.
How to Save a Dead Friend (dir. Marusia Syroechkovskaia, 2022), details the director’s relationship with a drug-addict who eventually kills himself, but relates this in passing to the wider country’s descent into authoritarianism. At one point, the main character’s lies about getting clean are intercut with Putin’s speeches about freedom and democracy in Russia, so it may be seen as another film indirectly related to the war.
The one Ukrainian war-related film in the Artdocfest Open competition was We Will Not Fade Away, (My ne zgasnemo, dir. Alisa Kovalenko, 2023), which also premiered at Berlin; it deals with restless, frustrated youths in the Donbas, dreaming about leaving and going to the Himalayas. There is a certain off-beat poetry to their lives among the slag heaps and pitheads of the region, which—they are adamant—is part of Ukraine and that not everyone there is a separatist (i.e., pro-Russian). The film was shot prior to Russia’s February 2022 invasion, but intertitles update us on the subsequent fate of the subjects: some are studying abroad, but there is no news of those who have remained in the Russian-occupied territories, leaving viewers to fear the worst.
Films from the main program that were unrelated to the war included Katja and Rimma (Katia i Rimma, dir. Gulia Mirzoeva, 2021), which shows the relationship between a teenage girl being brought up by her grandmother in Dushanbe, against the backdrop of an impending move to a new apartment and the demolition of the old one. Artem and Eva (Artem i Eva, dir. Evgenii Milykh, 2023) is about a young couple who become porn stars, but while the woman thrives, the man finds it not as spiritually fulfilling as he had hoped. Paradise (dir. Aleksandr Arbaturov, 2022) and the Oscar-nominated short film Haulout (Vykhod, dir. Maksim Arbugaev, Evgeniia Arbugaeva, 2022) both address the climate crisis, the first through Yakut forestry officials fighting forest fires with no help from Moscow, and the second through the story of a scientist who monitors the gathering of walruses in Chukotka, their declining population and reaction to the lack of ice. Both were produced by foreign, and not Russian companies.
While the focus of this program, and the festival more broadly, was overwhelmingly on the present, a sui generis ‘documentary fairy tale’ about a transgender ornithologist, A Hawk as Big as a Horse (Iastreb razmerom s loshad’, dir. Sasha Kulak, 2022) won the Best Director prize, traditionally seen as the runner-up on the awards list. There were also some historical films in the program, including one about Soviet PoWs in the main program, entitled Turn Your Body to the Sun (dir. Aliona van der Horst, 2021), but the by far the most significant history film was not screened at Artdocfest Riga, but instead included in Artdocnet: Famine (dir. Tat’iana Sorokina, 2022), which depicts the famine in Russia and Ukraine in 1921–22, which was the largest in the countries’ history up to that point, killing approximately five million people, and the international humanitarian aid campaign spearheaded by the US American Relief Administration. The film was banned in 2022 from public screenings in Russia, probably due to the way it shows the USA’s aid to Russia in a positive light, and draws parallels with the events of the Holodomor famine in Ukraine in 1932–33.
The festival’s other competition is entitled Baltic Focus, and it has been running since the creation of the Artdocfest in 2021 as an international film festival with Riga as its primary location; it comprises 14 films, all directed by filmmakers from countries adjoining the Baltic Sea. There were many films in this program that had absolutely nothing to do with the present conflict, such as Estonian director Max Golmidov’s Yoyogi, an observational film about life in the eponymous Japanese park, which whimsically combines disparate scenes, for instance, of would-be rap artists and picnickers; it won the Best Director prize in this competition. However, here too the war intruded through Mantas Kvedaravičius’s post-humous film Mariupolis 2, edited by the director’s widow following his tragic death at the hands of the Russian occupiers in March 2022. As such, it is not a finished film, as the footage itself was Kvedaravičius’s preliminary cinematic sketch for a film. Nevertheless, the observational, durational approach in a small part of the city captures a sense of the everyday horror of the war, the constant sound of gunfire, the habituation to death and the precariousness of human society, as the subjects scavenge for useful items, such as a precious petrol-fueled generator, and cook soup together on an improvised fire. Also appearing in the Baltic Focus program (as well as in Artdocfest Open) was Danish director Simon Lereng Wilmont’s A House Made of Splinters (2022) about an orphanage in Eastern Ukraine, featuring a voice-over by one of the social workers reflecting, amongst other things, on the way the war has made life even harder for these troubled and unfortunate children. This Oscar-nominated film opened the festival and has been widely screened, including on BBC television.
The festival closed with Manskii’s own film, Eastern Front, co-directed with Yevhen Tytarenko, which has rightly been shown to wide acclaim for its combination of images from the front and scenes from Western Ukraine where the main figures reflect upon the war, Ukrainian identity, Russian propaganda and other issues, which all make the images from the frontline more poignant. This echoes the approach taken in one of Tytarenko’s previous films, War for Peace (Viina za mir, 2017), where the images taken from his activities as a medic treating wounded Ukrainian soldiers are intercut with interviews with his comrades. This film was screened in the War Before War section as part of an eight-film festival program unerringly focused on the war. Many of these films, such as Manskii’s Close Relations (Rodnye, 2016); Iryna Tsylik’s The Earth is Blue as an Orange (Zemlia blakytna, niby apel’syn, 2020); Kvedaravičius’ Mariupolis (2016); Alina Gorlova’s This Rain Will Never Stop (2020)—almost all Ukrainian or Russian, have already been reviewed in KinoKultura. In showing these films, the curators invited reflection as to how we allowed this war to happen, and how it was largely ignored by the wider world until now. Here Artdocfest itself can answer that it tried very hard to bring the Ukrainian or anti-war side of the story to the Russian spectator, going up against the censorship system and random violence with the 2017 films Beata Bubenets’ Flight of a Bullet (Polet puli) disrupted by nationalist protesters, and Yevhen Tytarenko’s War for Peace, which Russian authorities banned.
The festival even continued to resist restrictions last year, conveying the Ukrainian perspective on the war, shortly after the start of Russia’s invasion, but these efforts were obstructed in Russia when Russian authorities closed down the festival screenings and Manskii had paint thrown over him by a protestor (Filippova 2022). He said that while he knew this might happen, he was not going to give in without a fight:
I can’t say that this turn of events was a surprise. But for us it was important not to give in, not to close the festival down at our own initiative. If the festival was closed down, then it would happen due to circumstances beyond our control, and not be our decision. That’s what finally happened. (Filippova 2022).
This approach of ignoring the signals given by the Russian government as a kind of informal censorship and daring the authorities to use force explicitly is one that the festival has followed for a number of years, and it is the yardstick of free cinema in the festival’s definition. Refusing to heed warning signs was and remains an important principle for Manskii, who saw the basic function of a festival in the preservation of an oasis of freedom. When that freedom was threatened, he had contingency plans to move the whole project to Riga.
Now that the festival has relocated to Riga, it will inevitably change focus, since it will not be an oasis anymore: Latvia is a stable, democratic member of the EU where freedom of expression is staunchly upheld. Russia’s war on Ukraine inevitably gives the festival a rationale for as long as it lasts, since documentary film is uniquely suited to the dual functions of combining recording and representation, with the need to make sense of and interpret the conflict. However, the screenings in 2023 were not always well attended, and this is possibly to do with the prominence of Russian-language films (even if they were not in the majority, and most of them were not produced in Russia); they are an important part of the festival. While all the films were shown with English subtitles and audio translation into Latvian, I suspect that this is an issue for the Latvian film-going public. It remains to be seen whether the festival can become a beacon for freedom and a forum for its definition, and for its advancement in the post-Soviet and Eastern European space. One thing is for certain: Manskii will not take the festival back to Russia until the Putin regime falls: “[t]here will be no ‘Artdocfest’ in Russia until the fall of the regime” (Filippova 2022).
Jeremy Hicks
Queen Mary University of London
Works Cited
Fanailova, Elena. 2023. “Litsom k sobytiiu. Vnimanie; Ukraina,” Radio Svoboda 7 March.
Filippova, Anna. 2022. “‘Artdokfesta’ v Rossii do padeniia rezhima ne budet.” Vitalii Manskii — o tom, kak v Moskve sorvali kinofestival (a ego samogo oblili kraskoi),” Meduza 31 March.
Higgins, Charlotte 2022. “Ukraine calls on western allies to boycott Russian culture,” The Guardian 7 December.
Manskii, Vitalii. 2023. “Introduction,” International Documentary Film Festival Artdocfest/Riga [Catalogue], Riga: Biedriba ‘Artdocfest media’, p. 4.
“Pitching Artdocfest/Riga,” 2023. International Documentary Film Festival Artdocfest/Riga [Catalogue], Riga: Biedriba “Artdocfest media,” p. 65.
Jeremy Hicks © 2023
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