The documentary about Russian soldiers at the front could not be shown publicly at the Zurich Film Festival. Apparently there were threats. But the jury could award the film a prize.
Anastasia Trofimova wants to give the Russian soldiers a face. Scene from “Russians at War”.
Anastasia Trofimova
107 films were on the program. 106 were shown. The 20th Zurich Film Festival (ZFF) comes to an end tomorrow, Sunday, with one less film than planned.
“Russians at War,” the controversial war documentary about Russian soldiers at the front, could not be shown. For security reasons, as the ZFF reported. However, the film remained in the documentary competition: the jury was allowed to see it. In this way, the festival organizers are signaling that they are sticking to their selection.
Now “Russians at War” could be awarded a Golden Eye on Saturday evening. The Brit Kevin Macdonald, who chairs the jury, is difficult to assess: Macdonald, a frequent filmmaker, is interested in a wide variety of topics.
Most recently he presented the Beatles documentary “One to One: John & Yoko” in Venice. Also new in streaming is a portrait of him about Kiev Mayor Vitaly Klitschko (“Klitschko: More Than a Fight”). In interviews about the Klitschko film, Macdonald took a clearly pro-Ukrainian position.
But that doesn’t have to mean that he rejects “Russians at War.” The film, which was made with French and Canadian money, is not Putin PR. Even though the Canadian-Russian director, Anastasia Trofimova, worked for the propaganda channel Russia Today until 2020. She worked as a war reporter for its documentary film department in Congo, Iraq and Syria.
No comparison to Riefenstahl
“Russians at War” now shows Russia’s war. In all its unspeakable senselessness. The film is shocking. There’s nothing glamorous about it; Trofimowa is far from the atmosphere of Leni Riefenstahl. “Russians at War” is certainly not suitable as a recruiting video. Several of the protagonists you meet over the course of 129 minutes end up mutilated or dead.
The film begins with Ilya. It’s the end of 2022. Dressed as Father Frost, the man is sitting in the Moscow subway. He wears his military uniform underneath the costume. Trofimova speaks to him.
Ilya is not Russian. He is Ukrainian. He comes from the Luhansk region, which was partially captured by pro-Russian separatists in 2014 and annexed by Russia in 2022. Ilya says that he lost everything in the fighting. He parrots Putin’s propaganda about a civil war.
Now Ilya is on home leave, visiting his family in Moscow. He should come back alive, says his little daughter at home. “Please don’t hurt either.” Then Ilya says goodbye to the troops. Trofimova follows him.
180 kilometers behind the front, the soldiers are waiting to be sent into battle. To fill up where colleagues have fallen. The men are cannon fodder. When they are called to the front, Trofimova advances with them. According to her own statement, she is traveling without permission.
Before the war, the Canadian-Russian director also worked for American networks, sometimes supplying them with material critical of the regime. As you can hear, she went quite far. While some observers doubt her version, a journalist who met her at the time believes it is plausible that she ventured to the front without authorization.
Anastasia Trofimova reportedly spent seven months in combat. She seems to have been traveling primarily with a small group of paramedics. Among them were two women.
Their actions hardly went unnoticed by the regime. Anyone who stays with the troops for months is registered. But perhaps the monitors had a different film in mind. Trofimova shows the war unvarnished. Military-wise, the Russians make a sloppy impression; everything seems confusing and uncoordinated.
«War crimes? Can’t be”
Trofimowa’s assembly offers little orientation either. But that adds to the anxiety. Once you’re sitting in a shelter with a group of soldiers and civilians, the impacts are getting closer and closer. Trofimova stoically holds the camera on the people in fear of death, she doesn’t comment.
But she doesn’t just observe, she also interacts. For example with Vitali, mid-thirties, chef. Having become a cynic, he says that the only way to get home from the front is feet first. Others express their dissatisfaction with contracts that have expired and pay is pending. At one point a soldier looks up from his Russian newspaper: “It’s all propaganda,” he says. Then he continues reading.
There are also the deluded. The young man named Cartoon, in his early twenties: Trofimova asks him what he thinks about Russian war crimes. He reacts in surprise. War crimes? From Russians? Cartoon can’t imagine this. “Why would Russians do something like that?”
The scene brought Trofimova a lot of criticism. By leaving the statement without contradiction, it would legitimize it. But Trofimova doesn’t try to lecture the soldiers. Or even convert.
In the cinéma vérité, which the filmmaker bases herself on, nothing is explained. Rather, the filmmaker’s presence leads to irritation among the protagonists, which creates surprising, truthful moments. This moment exemplifies the aberrations of a young Russian soldier.
Other scenes are more debatable. What is the purpose of pictures that capture swastika graffiti while walking through the ruins of a bombed-out Ukrainian city? Is this suggesting that the war, as Putin claims, is directed against Ukrainian Nazis? Trofimova would answer that that’s just how she found these swastikas. But who sprayed them?
Or in the film’s most questionable scene, a soldier shows a cell phone video: in it, a Ukrainian combat drone presumably shoots a defenseless Russian soldier several times. Why does the filmmaker show this? Because the soldier showed her, that would probably be her response. Now the moment may have happened that way. But that alone doesn’t justify his presence in the film. Even the documentary film, which strives for the greatest objectivity, develops a subjective color through the selection of material. Here the film has a pro-Russian side.
What is also shocking is that responsibilities are never named. Nobody is a perpetrator. Trofimova gives the impression that the war came almost fatefully to innocent people. Slavic fatalism prevails. Cinema of the anti-enlightenment variety.
But Anastasia Trofimova doesn’t understand Putin. In interviews, the director, who left Russia after filming, clearly condemned the war. She also has no doubts about Russian war crimes. She sees herself as an anti-war reporter. Her aim is to show that war causes devastation everywhere. That Russian soldiers are also people, and more than that: victims.
There’s nothing wrong with that. Just because you have compassion for a Russian doesn’t change the fact that you have even greater sympathy for the Ukrainians who are being attacked. With the film, Trofimova does not absolve the soldiers of their responsibility: some of the men are in their own situation, others are at the front out of less voluntary choice. One is ignorant, the other is indoctrinated: guilt has many facets.
Ukrainian ambassador intervenes
One can hardly expect a Ukraine at war to be open to such ambivalence. It is fundamentally understandable that Kyiv is mobilizing against the documentation. In Toronto, it was the Ukrainian Consul General who called for a boycott of the film. On X, the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry wrote that the ZFF should not ruin its reputation. According to “Weltwoche”, the Ukrainian ambassador in Bern, Irina Wenediktova, presented to Ignazio Cassis’ Foreign Affairs Department (EDA).
The Zurich Film Festival, which belongs to the NZZ but is independent of the editorial team, does not comment on the events. Both official bodies and radical activists probably harassed the ZFF employees. As in Toronto, there were threats of violence against the organizers in Zurich.
Wherever the film appears, the same pattern. Most recently, “Russians at War” was canceled at the festival in Athens. Here too, there were suddenly safety concerns. If three events collapse at the same time, one must assume that the threat situation is serious. Apparently well-connected, radical Ukrainian activists are operating. Nevertheless, it is irritating that it should not be possible to set up the necessary security measures. Or is it simply a cost-benefit analysis?
The decision was not easy for the organizers in Zurich. Even when public pressure came from Kiev, they stuck to the film. But an aftertaste remains. Not least because those responsible are not commenting. The fact that they do not specifically name the Ukrainian threat is strange. This is reminiscent of the reflex of ignoring the background of violent perpetrators because it could play into the hands of the wrong political side.
With all sympathy for the war-ravaged country: If it is true that Ukrainian actors harassed a Swiss cultural event with threats of violence, this must be discussed. Then the Zurich Film Festival, which likes to describe itself as a guardian against cancel culture (Polanski, Winnetou), also has to defend itself. Perhaps the best thing that could happen to the festival now would be a courageous jury decision.
