War in (exiled) Russian documentaries

Since 2022, the Russian independent documentary film festival has been forcibly moved to Riga where, once again this year, it is telling the story of ‘The world at war’. Director Vitalij Manskij: ‘The internal war being waged in Moscow against civil society is no less significant’.

Moscow (AsiaNews) - Since 2007, Russia has hosted a major independent documentary film festival, Artdokfest, which since 2014 has been held for a few years in two different versions, in Moscow and Riga in Latvia.

Part of the management had in fact spoken out against the annexation of Crimea, and the festival was denied state funding, mainly because of the statements of the director Vitalij Manskij, a well-known documentary maker, who continued the activities by showing documentary programmes from Ukraine.

At the beginning of March 2022, after the invasion, the festival was officially cancelled, and its organisers decided not to hold any more activities under the current regime.

This year, therefore, for the third time the festival is being held only in Riga, where Manskij has moved, and where he was met by correspondents from Radio Svoboda, to whom he explained that ‘we have kept some traditions from the Moscow days, but it is now a new event’.

The ArtDocFest Open competition remains, and the theme today is ‘The world at war’, focusing on current conflicts, but also on the struggle for freedom, as ‘war can take the form of aggression by the Russian army in Ukraine, but the internal war in Russia with civil society is no less important’, says the festival director.

The festival also holds a competition called Baltijskij Fokus, the ‘Baltic Focus’, which takes advantage of the favourable conditions in the Baltic countries as a comfort zone for those who simply want to dedicate themselves to documentary cinema.

Latvia in particular does not intend to be influenced by border tensions, ‘convinced that by turning our backs on the fire, our hair will not catch on fire’, comments Manskij, who nevertheless mentions a film about Ukraine, and the Polish documentary ‘The Trains’ by Maciej Drigas, linked to the most tragic stories of the 20th century and to the wars, like the trains to Auschwitz and the Nazi concentration camps.

The train of Hitler's concentration camps today recalls that of the Ukrainian refugees deported to Russia, and the connections are shown by the documentaries in which ‘artistic images are combined with news material’, recalling and showing the re-edited images of the bonfires during the festivities in socialist Poland, which ‘create a unique image of Soviet times’.

Another film in the competition is ‘Dear, Beautiful, Beloved’ by the Ukrainian Jurij Rečinskyj, now living in Austria. It's about how the bodies of fallen soldiers are prepared to be handed over to relatives, in the emotions of death consecrated to the defence of the homeland.

Another documentary, ‘Mission 200’, is about a Ukrainian woman who ran a tourist agency before the Russian invasion, organising trips with the slogan ‘I'll send you to paradise’, and today has changed the object of her activities, driving the hearses of those who died in the madness of war. All the films in the ArtDoc Open programme are in some way related to conflict zones, even when they talk about parents abusing their children, or the Azerbaijani film about ‘cinematographic mechanics’, or about family conflicts and the story of a girl in Armenia who dreams of becoming a dancer, while her father is involved in dog fighting.

Only one Danish film is about ‘rest’, in a tourist area out of season, where it is not clear in what time and place the protagonists are, perhaps the work ‘most in harmony with the spirit of the times we are living’. Manskij actually believes that ‘resting today is immoral’, and that showing scenes like those in the Danish film is important only to ‘take a break’ from the dramas taking place. Spectators in various countries ask the organisers: ‘Who are you making these films for?’ and the director replies ‘not for you, who know what you're going to see, but for those in the next room watching Barbie and not really knowing what world they live in’.

Manskij himself directed a film called ‘Approach Time’, in which war enters the biological cycle of people's blood, a part of which becomes ineradicable and causes a chronic disease that clouds the conscience; Russian documentaries in Latvia, on the other hand, try to reawaken it.