Words of War: The Anna Politkovskaya Story

October 7^th might be the most evil date in the calendar. Obviously, it has become infamous for the Hamas’s horrific 2023 terror attacks. Furthermore, in 2006, independent Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya was ruthlessly gunned down, in a blatantly politically motivated assassination, on October 7^th—a date possibly selected as a “birthday gift” for Putin, who was indeed born on that very date. It was a tragedy, an outrage, and a precursor of worse atrocities to come. Politskaya’s idea of journalism was telling the truth, without fear or favor. Not surprisingly, that incurred the Putin regime’s wrath, as viewers witness in James Strong’s biographical drama, Words of War, which opens today in New York.

Politkovskaya wrote for Novaya Gazeta, Russia’s only editorially independent newspaper, edited by Dmitry Muratov, a co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021. Muratov is a muckraker at heart, but even he worries about the risks Politkovskaya takes. Frequently reporting from the battlefields of Russia’s dirty war in Chechnya, she earns the Chechens’ trust revealing Russian war crimes. She also earns Russian military’s hostility and several beatings.

Her family is not necessarily thrilled with her new notoriety, especially her son Ilya. Her semi-estranged husband Alexander somewhat resents seeing her journalistic prestige eclipsing his own. Yet, he makes a point of recording the death threats she receives, which becomes almost a full-time job. Thanks to the credibility she established, the Chechen militia hostage-takers requested her as a mediator during the Moscow Theater Siege, so she saw first-hand how the Russian police killed 132 innocent civilians through their use of an opioid-derived chemical agent.

The film begins with the first attempt on Politkovskaya’s life, an airliner poisoning that eerily parallels the 2020 attempted assassination of Alexei Navalny, and then rewinds to show the why’s and how’s. Frankly, it really starts with a bang, because her escape from the compromised hospital, engineered by Muratov and her grown children, Ilya and Vera, is a true white-knuckle sequence.

It is also worth noting Words of War never indulges in hagiography. As portrayed by the aptly cast Maxine Peake, Politkovskaya is often difficult, but always acutely human. She is also more right than wrong, at least on the big-picture issues.

If you don’t know how it ends, then the Kremlin would like to commend you on your choice of news sources. For the rest of us who understand what is coming, it still lands as a gut-punch, because it is so cold and cruel. We can’t say we weren’t warned. What happened to Politkovskaya happened to Navalny and the war crimes committed in Chechnya were repeated in Ukraine.

DocuWeeks NY ’11: A Bitter Taste of Freedom

Last week, the obedient Russian “press” dutifully “reported” a silly story about Putin, Russia’s gangster-in-chief, “discovering” Greek urns while on a diving trip. Anna Politkovskaya never wrote such propaganda pieces. As a result, she was assassinated nearly five years ago. While Politkovskaya’s murder has become a symbol of Russia’s regression back into Soviet-style dictatorship, for those close to the crusading journalist, her loss is a more personal tragedy. Longtime friend and filmmaker Marina Goldovskaya mourns the Politkovskaya she knew in A Bitter Taste of Freedom (trailer here), which screens this Friday in New York during the Oscar-qualifying DocuWeeks 2011.

In happier times, Goldovskaya had previously profiled Politkovskaya and her future ex-husband Alexander, who was then better known than she for his work as a television presenter. During the filming of A Taste of Freedom, Perestroika was in its endgame, when constitutional democracy seemed like a very real future prospect. The Yeltsin disappointments and the Putin repression would add the bitterness to Goldovskaya’s second documentary featuring Politkovskaya.

As one of the few (perhaps only) journalists willing to challenge the government’s official lines on the dirty war on Chechnya and the raid on Moscow theater, Politkovskaya earned a fair degree of celebrity as well as powerful enemies. To a degree, she has become an iconic figure. However, Goldovskaya makes a concerted effort to capture the muckraker’s private side. The audience gets a fuller sense of her humor and her self-effacing nature in personal conversations Goldovskaya fortuitously recorded on film. There is also something unexpectedly alluring about the intelligent and spirited woman that never comes across in the familiar photos of Politkovskaya peering owlishly through her eye-glasses.

Putin allies hoping to besmirch Politkovskaya as a neglectful mother will be further frustrated by Goldovskaya’s follow-up documentary. According to her daughter, somehow Politkovskaya always tended to her family’s needs, even while titling at Kremlin windmills. Yet, though there is a deliberate focus on Politkovskaya the flesh and blood person, Bitter is still a newsworthy film, including chilling footage of Politkovskaya in the hospital still suffering from the Rostov-on-Don poisoning incident, the first clear-cut attempt on her life. We also learn the American embassy unequivocally expressed to the journalist concerns for her safety.

By presenting a fully dimensional portrait of Politkovskaya, Bitter never feels like stilted hagiography. The fact that she was actively pursuing new romances, while looking after her children as best a parent can, leads one to fully appreciate her commitment and ultimately her sacrifice. Highly recommended, Bitter provides a compellingly intimate portrait of heroism. Distributed internationally by Yellow Affair, it runs for one week at the IFC Center beginning this Friday (8/19), as part of the second wave of DocuWeeks New York, hopefully with many more screenings to come.

HRW: Letter to Anna

If ever there was a woman who personified strength, dignity, and a commitment to human rights, it was Anna Politkovskaya, the crusading Russian journalist assassinated for investigating the neo-Soviet Putin regime. Unfortunately, there is not much human rights watching going on at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival, besides Letter to Anna, Eric Bergkraut’s dogged documentary investigation into her death (trailer here).

Of the thirty two films at the HRW Fest, five focus their fire on Israel and four concentrate on America, clearly safe targets to shoot at. Few films at the fest, besides Letter, tackle a government perfectly willing to murder those who questions its policies, as in the case of Politkovskaya in Putin’s Russia. (To be fair, it sounds like China’s Stolen Children also deserves recognition for taking on the country’s one child policy, but the fest completely ignores Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, and North Korea.) However, the sins of the festival should not be held against Letter, a first-rate documentary.

When Politkovskaya looks into the camera and tells Bergkraut she expects to be killed, it is spooky. Obviously, she knew what she was talking about, having already survived a poisoning attempt (evidently no Polonium was available to those would-be assassins). Politkovskaya made her name exposing human rights abuses (real ones) in Chechnya, again nearly getting killed in the process. It was while filming a documentary on the Russian Dirty War that Bergkraut filmed hours of interview footage with Politkovskaya, which formed the backbone of Letter.

Although one could uncharitably characterize Letter as a film built around outtakes, much of that footage is quite insightful. Perhaps most controversial will be his decision to begin by taking the audience through her assassination step by step. As Bergkraut marshals the facts and circumstances around the event he makes a compelling case against the Putin machine. By American legal standards, he would probably have enough to indict, but not convict. Of course, on a common sense level, the notion that a free-agent in Putin’s Russia would take out a prominent Putin critic without the go-ahead from the highest levels, stretches all believability.

Things are bad in Russia—no question. Relatively few have been willing to publically challenge Putin’s authoritarian rule. Some of those who did join Politkovskaya, like democracy activist Garry Kasparov, participated in the film. We also hear from expat billionaire Boris Berezovsky, perhaps a problematic anti-Putin spokesman, but always a good interview.

Letter would make for good, if depressing, companion viewing with Poisoned By Polonium, as Litvinenko appears in the former and Politkovskaya is also featured in the latter. Politkovskaya had everything to live for, having just heard she was about to become a grandmother. However, she never backed down in her attempts to hold Putin’s government accountable for its crimes. If you want to see what “patriotic dissent” looks like, Politkovskaya is its human face.

Bergkraut makes another credible case against Putin’s criminal reign, and give Susan Sarandon credit for recording the English narration (and Catherine Deneuve for the French), but are people paying attention to the increasingly frightening developments in Russia? Letter screens only once during the fifteen day film festival, Thursday the 26th, at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater.

(Thanks again to La Russophobe for sharing this review with their readers.)