Everybody is wrong about TIFF film
Early in “Russians at War,” a new film by the Russian-Canadian filmmaker Anastasia Trofimova, a soldier named Vitaly explains to his comrades why they’re being followed by a woman with a camera. “It’s about us,” Vitaly says. “Not like on TV, but the truth.” All the while, Kremlin propaganda plays on the TV behind them. Later, flipping through a “patriotic” military newspaper, Vitaly laments the “dangerous” pull of this propaganda. He continues reading every page.
These scenes, captured by Trofimova over seven months embedded with Russian forces in eastern Ukraine, speak volumes. “Russians at War” is a film that purports to break through the propaganda of Moscow’s brutal war, but instead it wallows in it.
Critics, including those who protested the film’s scheduled appearance at the Toronto International Film Festival, have called “Russians at War” shameless pro-Russian propaganda and demanded, with some success, that it be censored. Some columnists who have seen the film say it is a fundamentally anti-war work of art which humanizes those who we are used to vilifying. After watching the film and speaking to Trofimova, I’m here to tell you that the truth lies in between: It is not propaganda, but it is informed by it. It is anti-war, but not pro-peace.
When I spoke to Trofimova last weekend by phone, she centred this film very much in her “personal journey” following these Russians fighters and medics as they pushed into occupied Ukraine — many fully aware they were heading to their own death. She was there to witness this “huge historical tragedy and a national catastrophe.”
As a piece of primary historical evidence, “Russians at War” is incredibly useful. It is a portrait of how nationalism, propaganda, and poverty can fill the ranks of an invading army and make this kind of neo-imperialist crusade possible. It is a look, albeit a shallow one, into the minds of those who are happy to kill and be killed in the name of the motherland “without asking questions,” as Trofimova puts it.
But where the movie fails is in Trofimova’s own failure to ask questions. She eschews an extraordinary opportunity to learn anything deeper about why, despite knowing they are being lied to, her subjects continue to fight Vladimir Putin’s war. She herself confesses at the end that “the real goals of this war are unclear to me.”
When she interviews “Cartoon,” a baby-faced soldier who calls himself a patriot, she asks about reports that his comrades had committed war crimes. Cartoon is taken aback and dismisses the idea. “Why would they?” he says. Trofimova doesn’t press.
To fully understand “Russians At War,” you must appreciate that it is neither documentary nor propaganda: It is Kino-Pravda, “film truth,” a style pioneered by Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov. Kino-Pravda sought to replace art and romanticism in cinema with scenes of real people living out the noble mundaneness of life.
But as Vertov explained, his films were not unbiased. “The choice of facts recorded” can be used to nudge “the work or peasant” into the right political position, he once said. His 1931 film “Enthusiasm” venerates happy and industrious Ukrainian coal miners at the exact time Josef Stalin’s government was deliberately starving millions of Ukrainians to death by withholding grain.
Trofimova says her selective vantage point is not a bug but a feature. “You capture one reality,” she told me. “I capture another reality.”
In trying to deconstruct the idea that these soldiers are either “superhuman or evil,” Trofimova offers us too narrow and simplistic a reality. She never even hints at the idea that it is regular people, not their political masters, who actually carry out atrocities.
We know it was regular Russians, in the same situation as Cartoon who operated the torture chambers near Kharkiv, who bombed a theatre full of civilians in Mariupol, and who gunned down defenceless citizens in Bucha.
When the film tries to assign blame for the war, it names Ukraine often. When criticism turns toward Moscow, however, it becomes suddenly vague and ephemeral. Putin, the architect of it all, is never mentioned: He appears only as a flicking figure on a TV screen. The film’s anti-war message comes off as beige and meaningless.
I don’t think Trofimova is a Kremlin stooge — she offers a “100 per cent” guarantee that her film has no involvement from any facet of the Russian government. And so there is no reason, in my mind, to censor, cancel, or denounce it.
“Russians at War,” however,” shouldn’t be viewed as pravda. It is an artistic effort which obscures a simple fact: It is the Russian government, enabled by its citizens, which continues to prosecute this war. Its soldiers are human, yes, but they are neither noble nor blameless for the carnage they cause.