I’d bet my shirt that Chrystia Freeland didn’t see it Russians at War when she denounced the film.
As often happens, organizations and personalities cry foul against a book, a TV show or a performance (remember the fate of SLAV by Robert Lepage in 2018) without having read or seen it. Even though she is of Ukrainian origin, it would be surprising if the Deputy Prime Minister, a former journalist to boot, could see Anastasia Trofimova’s film as a propaganda tool in favor of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The intervention of Ms. Freeland and the Ukrainian Canadian Congress nearly relegated the documentary to oblivion. After funding it, TV Ontario disowned it and after scheduling it, the Toronto International Film Festival cancelled its presentation. The premiere of Russians at War took place in September, out of competition, at the Venice Biennale. After a few days of controversy, TIFF changed its mind and presented the film on Tuesday of this week. It is not yet known whether TV Ontario will also change its mind.
A documentary too long
I watched the film yesterday. It is a long documentary, much too long (2h 9min), which will not mark the history of cinema, if not for the controversy it has aroused. The director Anastasia Trofimova, a Canadian of Russian origin, is not without merit for having followed for seven months a battalion of Russian volunteers and conscripts who put less ardor into fighting than into smoking and drinking.
The film clearly shows the stupidity of war and the enormous stupidity of this conflict which began in Donbass in the spring of 2014 and culminated in the invasion of Ukraine by the Russians on February 24, 2022. At the risk of being arrested and even being killed or injured, the director followed these lost, confused, disgusted, poorly equipped and poorly informed fighters for seven months.
Apart from a few soldiers convinced that they are fighting Nazis, most do not know why they are fighting, except for dollars that are slow in arriving and even seem uncertain.
We do politics
This more or less successful film by a filmmaker whose opinion does not yet seem to be well-defined ends in a cemetery where many victims of the war lie. Over these dark images, the director pronounces this sentence heavy with meaning: “Here lies the ordinary guys on whose bones big policies are made!” (Here lie ordinary people on whose bones politics is played!)
Russians at War is not a propaganda film, but it is a film that will do nothing to help people understand this stupid war and hasten its end.
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