The Film Industry Is Terrified Of Vladimir Putin

Almost a year ago, Vladimir Putin started massing his forces for the invasion of Ukraine. It’s been some ten months since he invaded. Correction, add eight years to that, because he started in 2014 with Donbas and Luhansk. You’d think there’d be a slew of films and documentaries on tap about it all, so fully aired and fanfared that we would be familiar with their existence. Can you think of one? No? After nine years. The film industry has shown scant inclination to address the topic. Bill Browder, pretty much the prime mover of the Magnitsky Act, superstar nemesis of the Kremlin, and author of two bestselling books about his anti-Putin fight – even he couldn’t get the film industry to support movies or documentaries of his books. In fact, three or four major documentaries about the latest invasion are now going a-begging, completed and ready for prime-time, but… with no distributors clamoring to sign them up. No theaters or television channels or streaming services willing to sign-on, not even offering to share the costs post-facto.

The docus were self-financed but not because the film makers are neophytes without accomplishments. On the contrary. They’re mostly by ultra-recognizable names. Sean Penn is one. His includes a personal interview with Zelensky. Another is the official nomination by Ukraine for the foreign Oscar titled Klondyke. Yet, another is Evgeny Afineevsky, winner of innumerable awards, an Oscar and Emmy nominee for his 2015 docu about Ukraine’s Euro-Maidan movement entitled Winter On Fire. A veteran filmmaker, an Israeli-American born in the Russian republic of Tatarstan, Evgeny grew up in the Soviet Union and knows all about Moscow’s totalitarian perfidy. He has also directed numerous motion pictures, plays, musicals – in short, a storied career. In 2016, his documentary Cries From Syria about the Assad regime’s unspeakable horrors and Moscow’s complicity won sustained acclaim and various awards. So he became a target for the kind of savage disinformation campaign meted out to prominent enemies of the Kremlin and its allies.

His current docu titled Freedom On Fire, lasting two-hours, was shot in Ukraine right up to August 19, the only one to follow events deep into the war. It premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September. Evgeny is busy racing around Europe and the US to film festivals, often alongside his lead protagonists, tirelessly exposing audiences to the plight of Ukrainians. This, in the face of relentless persecution: he was poisoned at the 2015 Toronto Film Festival, sued in the US in 2017 for his Syria film, endlessly berated by Sputnik and Russia Today as “Al Quaeda In Hollywood” and much else. The campaign continues to the present. There were threats against the Doc NYU festival in November for the showing of “Freedom”. During the Q&A afterwards, provocateurs stood up and screamed abuse. So there is no excuse for the industry to shy away from his work, from supporting and distributing and celebrating it, and thereby pushing back against Russian persecution and propaganda. Or indeed any film that stands up to the Kremlin.

The documentary itself is a model of the art form. It manages that rarest of achievements, a poignant, humanizing, inspiring catharsis amid inexplicable tragedy by delicately but firmly staying focused on the human face of unfolding events. At no point does the viewer feel alienated, horrified by explicitly presented vile spectacles of carnage crafted by Moscow. We get glimpses, but mostly the gory realities are filtered to us tangentially through deeply normal characters, whose normality is a kind of heroism, who until the day before yesterday needed merely to be themselves – until a bizarre unspeakable distortion of reality descended on them. The concept of normality comes up repeatedly, a precious commodity. We watch their bewildered adjustments, we understand and identify, they genuinely could be us. Thus, for example, the predicament of ‘Picasso’, a bohemian artist in suddenly occupied territory, who volunteers to bodybag the civilian dead left strewn around by the Russians. A cheerful, round-faced guy who says he’s normally an optimist. Normally. You can still see on his features the remnants of his quirky humor, his surly friendliness, his once sacred artist’s affectations.

The main character, if there is one, who also tours with Evgeny to select screenings, is Natalya Nagornaya, a correspondent for Ukraine’s 1+1 TV channel. A thoroughly approachable, popular, figure in her regular life as an ubiquitous national/local reporter now has to go to once familiar places to report, all too often, deeply disturbing phenomena. But as she says, she realized that normality for ordinary people is measured by three things: bread, water, news. She is determined to keep her end of the bargain. She has that slightly lopsided weary smile of skepticism, the female correspondent’s standard toolbox choice when routinely confronted by the implausible. Here, it’s a residue tinged with sadness from a more manageable time, a very recent past not idyllic or spotless to be sure, but comprehensible until recently. At one point, as she does a piece-to-camera about the military retaking a place where atrocity reigned, tears course down her face uncontrollably as she tries to be upbeat. “Don’t cry Natalia, don’t cry” comes a shout from a car full of soldiers going by.

That then is the leitmotif of the film, the constant reimposition of the human on incomprehensible horror. Everywhere we see the indomitability of children and old folk, healing forces, community, constantly enduring, reclaiming and restoring. We end up agog at the sheer wisdom of Ukrainians, grateful for the grace they’ve shown us, a gift for a lifetime, something for us all to revere. And that too is the priceless gift of this film. No thanks to the film industry.