Eastern Front, on OVID.tv

They are a bit like Frederic Henry in A Farewell to Arms, but the war is happening in their own country. For them, volunteering as a medics and ambulance drivers was the only way they could serve during the war. Many started in the Donbass region as early as 2014 and they continued to serve following Putin’s full invasion, despite some being judged “unfit” for armed combat (due to health reasons). Medic Yevhen Titarenko captures a country that is remarkably unified, despite being under constant fire in Eastern Front, his eye-witness documentary (completed with the editorial input of “co-director” Vitaliy Mansky, the acclaimed documentarian exiled to Latvia), which premieres today on OVID.tv.

You will definitely see some things driving an ambulance around Kherson and Kharkiv. That is why Titarenko started documenting the horrors he witnessed, employing hand-held devices, smart phones, and body cams. Much of what he captured is horrifying. Yet, some of the quiet moments are even more telling.

In between their emergency calls, Titarenko and his fellow medics, relax, chew the fat, and even celebrate being alive together. Many have similar stories, especially those who hail from families with strong Russian connections. At first, they were the odd ones out for supporting the Maidan protests. However, after Putin’s illegal invasion, their parents and grandparents have become ardent Ukrainian patriots. Their anecdotal evidence suggest Putin has ironically unified the supposedly fractious Ukrainians—against Russia.

Eastern Front is a powerful and bracing film. However, it might unfairly suffer in comparison if seen soon after Mstyslav Chernov’s jaw-droppingly harrowing 20 Days in Mariupol. Yet, it has other merits, very definitely including the medics’ thoughts on Ukrainian unity and Russian propaganda. Nevertheless, Titarenko’s concluding dash through a war-zone can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the Normandy landing in Saving Private Ryan.

CIFF ’18: Putin’s Witnesses

It was a scene worthy of the third Omen movie. Late in the evening on New Year’s Eve, 1999, Boris Yeltsin announced his resignation as president of Russia and the elevation of his successor Vladimir Putin—the new “strong hand” for a new millennium. Neither Russia nor the rest of the world realized what his elevation and subsequent election meant at the time, but maybe we shouldn’t judge ourselves too harshly. Vitaly Mansky only had an inkling of how bad things could get, even though repeatedly filmed Putin up close and personal for a series of documentaries broadcast on Russian state television. Mansky still had all his raw footage, so he was able to reassemble it into an eerie chronicle of Putin’s solidification of power. Hindsight is disconcertingly spooky in Mansky’s Putin’s Witnesses (trailer here), which screens as part of a mini-Mansky retrospective at the 2018 Camden International Film Festival.

Mansky is no stranger to controversy. He rather ticked off two oppressive regimes when he turned the Russian financed puff piece he was supposed to be shooting in the DPRK into Under the Sun, an expose of the pariah nation’s propaganda techniques. He now resides in Latvia. Putin’s Witnesses will make it even more difficult for him to return to his homeland for the foreseeable future.

At times, the fly-on-the-wall footage Mansky captured is just jaw-dropping. We see in no uncertain terms how Putin’s campaign team staged events for the benefit of the complaint state media, like the supposedly spontaneous visit to his beloved grey-hair elementary teacher (actually, that was Mansky’s idea). It also clearly contradicts the notion that Putin was too busy with affairs of state to engage in a traditional campaign.

Simultaneously, Mansky was also working on profiles of Yeltsin, so he has ample footage of the late president and his family reacting to his hand-picked successor electoral victory and the early months of his first full term. As you might expect, their initial elation gives way to pronounced disappointment. Yet, easily the most telling sequence in the film occurs during election night at the Putin campaign war room, allowing Mansky to explain how nearly the entire inner circle have now joined the opposition or died under mysterious circumstances.

Arguably, the most important (and under-reported in Western media) events Mansky documents involve Putin’s re-embrace of Soviet anthems, banners, and iconography. It is pretty surreal to watch Nikita Mikhalkov, the director of Burnt by the Sun, and his composer father de-Communizing an old Soviet marching dirge, but Mansky has the footage to prove it happened. Frankly, every conservative drinking Trump’s Russian Kool-Aid needs to see this film. Remember Reagan and the Cold War? The Gipper would recognize Putin for exactly what he is: a tyrant and a dangerous enemy of the Free World.

Like Under the Sun, Putin’s Witnesses is a pretty gutsy work of documentary filmmaking. What really distinguishes the latter from other Putin docs is the way Mansky ruthlessly judges his own culpability. He had misgivings about the former KGB agent right from the start, but he still participated in Putin’s PR campaign. Yet, if someone else had done it, the world would most likely never have the chance to see this footage. Editor Gunta Ikere also deserves enormous credit for helping shape Mansky’s footage into such an urgent and compelling narrative. We see, slowly but surely, how democracy is undermined and freedom is lost. Very highly recommended, Putin’s Witnesses screens Friday evening (9/14), as part of this year’s CIFF.

Under the Sun: North Korea Exposed by its Own Propaganda

Lee Zin-mi really is a sweet little girl, but that is about the only true thing about the propaganda film she was supposed to star in. Russian filmmaker Vitaly Mansky was supposed to make it, because he would have given it international credibility. However, unlike other disgracefully compliant filmmakers allowed inside the notoriously closed state, he quickly and repeatedly clashed with his minders. Mansky duly followed the ground-rules requiring him to allow the authorities to review his footage each night, but digital is a subversive format. Unbeknownst to them, Mansky’s camera was not simply recording between “action” and “cut.” He also captured the minders as they staged the phony propaganda. Viewers get a rare chance to peak behind the curtain of DPRK rhetoric to see the enforcers threatening little girls to look “joyous” or else in Mansky’s Under the Sun (trailer here), which opens this Wednesday in New York.

Wherever little Lee goes, there is always someone there to lecture her (and us) on the glories of the Kim Royal Dynasty. As she prepares for her initiation into the Children’s Union, her family will live in a fake apartment (nice, but not spectacular by most nations’ standards) and actually eat regular meals. Her father starts the film as a journalist, but he then becomes the engineer at a garment factory. We get to see him celebrate with the joyful workers when their latest productivity results are announced, but with each successive take, the minders keep increasing their quota-busting percentages.

Under the Sun starts slow, allowing us to get to know Lee and her family. However, when Mansky and editor Andrej Paperny let the first apparatchik peak into the frame, the film takes a seriously sinister turn. We then watch as Lee’s pageant dance instructor reduces her to tears. Of course, the command to “look happy” always remains in full force.

Even when they are faking it, everyone looks miserable in North Korea. This is especially true of the everyday crowd footage Mansky presumably captured surreptitiously. Yet, what really makes the film sting are the moments when we see how much pressure young Lee is under. She is just a kid. She shouldn’t have the full weight of the Kim family dictatorship weighing down on her. However, if Mansky had ignored this terrible reality, it would only make matters worse.

Needless to say, Under the Sun has provoked outrage from North Korean authorities, as well as Putin’s Ministry of Culture, which thought it was co-financing a very different film. Perhaps most disappointing was the revelation a MoMA curator axed Under the Sun from this year’s Documentary Fortnight, for fear of offending North Korea. That led to a mini-firestorm and her apparent dismissal. If that is indeed how things went down, MoMA deserves credit. For too long and too often, submitting to censorship demands at the expense of our freedoms has been seen as the safe choice. At least in this case, there were professional costs for betraying the values of free expression all film curators should necessarily share.

Be that as it may, Under the Sun is a fascinating film, but it could have used Mansky’s voice to more fully explain what was happening just outside our field of vision. We can see enough to fully understand the gist of the situation, but there must have been even greater lunacy they tried to hide from the mostly Russian crew. Still, there is an unvarnished, un-spun integrity to the film as it is.

The world cinema community has a dual responsibility in this case. We should all see Under the Sun and take stock of the ways Mansky circumvented his minders. (Australian filmmaker Anna Broinowski should hang her head in shame, because Under the Sun truly exposes how cravenly subservient she was while making the gutless puff piece, Aim High in Creation.) Going forward, the international film world also should do its best to keep tabs on Lee and her family. The regime should be made to understand if anything happens to the Lees, it will reflect disgrace on them. Very highly recommended, Under the Sun opens this Wednesday (7/6) in New York, at Film Forum.