Abstract
It feels like a different era. Navalny was alive and there was no full-scale war of aggression by Russia against Ukraine. This was before the emergence of Belarus’s opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the protests which rocked the country and the massive repression that followed.
Born in Western Ukraine and having moved to Moscow in the 1980s, Mansky is now one of the top internationally recognised documentary filmmakers. His films have been shown at more than a thousand festivals worldwide and won numerous awards. In 2007 he founded Artdocfest in Russia, an independent documentary festival that quickly became a unique space for challenging the state’s domination of the media. It provided a showcase for films dedicated to topics either entirely absent or misrepresented in the Russian loyalist media.
He last tried to hold Artdocfest in Moscow in March 2022, just after the start of the war, when he was harassed and sprayed with paint by those reported in the press as activists from an ultranationalist movement.
It had been clear for some time, he says, that the festival could never remain free, civilised, open and uncensored in Russia and after the annexation of Crimea, he brought the main festival to the Latvian capital where he had moved, and it became Artdocfest Riga. For a few years he showed the main programming in Latvia and then screened some of the films in Russia, censorship permitting, but after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, Mansky completely withdrew.
Now the festival exists as an independent, international documentary film festival in Riga and the programming has become even edgier. Artdocfest also travels to various cities in Central Asian countries (except Turkmenistan), to the states of the former Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc, even to the “old” Europe. Last year it had screenings in Paris which were very well received and the plan is to continue next year. The festival also supports the films with direct funding, especially those from undemocratic countries.
I ask him first how the international community can show solidarity and support.
“Solidarity, above all, is providing the screens to those films that reflect the tragic reality in countries with authoritarian regimes,” he says.
“That is to say, you have to understand that there are people who continue to record the reality that is happening in a warring country and try to tell about the nature, the roots, the consequences of these crimes, and they do it at their own risk. They do it really risking their lives and their freedom, their own and their loved ones.”
I ask about calls to boycott Russian culture, which in itself is a complicated topic. Artdocfest has a rule that films produced by state studios in Russia and Belarus will not be shown, but filmmakers who have left their countries and do not accept current circumstances will be featured.
What does Mansky think about the “no good Russians” discourse. Why are some Ukrainians against sharing a platform with all Russians?
“You know, as far as Ukrainians are concerned, it’s a completely separate story, he says. “And I am in solidarity with my Ukrainian colleagues who find it difficult to be physically present in the same space with people from Russia, because of the crimes and the grief, the losses that Ukrainians suffer every day at home as a result of Russian aggression. This gives them not just the right to intolerance but it requires our understanding of it, which is sometimes considered excessive. But it is not excessive, it is a natural, understandable reaction to the pain.
“And when an opera theatre in Ukraine removes Swan Lake from the repertoire, for example, I see it as an appropriate, natural and understandable gesture. After all, when Russia is forbidden to use the Russian anthem at international competitions, they use Tchaikovsky’s concerto as the anthem of a warring country.”
But he draws a distinction when it comes to Russian culture outside Ukraine and Russia itself: “When it comes to La Scala or America, other European capitals, here I would [like to] see a more reasonable and more sober understanding and approach to these issues. In the civilised world, the state does not dictate or regulate cultural policy.
“In a free society, the right to make decisions is in the hands of those people who have earned the right to curate festivals, theatres, exhibitions..., and it is a matter of using their sense of adequacy, balance, fairness and so on when they make a decision.
“In other words, the boycott of Russian culture is an understandable thing. Boycott in general and sanctions in the broad sense of the word, economic, political, and cultural is an understandable and adequate thing but balance and common sense is required.”
In September 2022, Mansky was put on a federal wanted list by the Russian authorities. At the same time, a criminal defamation case was initiated by pro-Kremlin film director and Moscow International Film Festival president Nikita Mikhalkov. The same year, the Kremlin declared Mansky a “foreign agent” for his opposition to the war in Ukraine.
A still from Mansky’s 2018 documentary, Putin’s Witnesses
CREDIT: Lifestyle pictures / Alamy
I ask him what this means in practice.
“This is, of course, a certain restriction of rights and it causes certain difficulties in everyday life, difficulties in communication. While working I have to take the role of an anonymous participant in some processes that we still influence, so as not to cause problems for people who still live and work in Russia. It’s a set of problems that make it impossible to enter the country, to do anything in the country. It’s one of the instruments of applying pressure.”
The body of Mansky’s work is very diverse. He and his camera had a close look at the first three presidents of the Russian Federation in the trilogy Gorbachev: After Empire (2001), Yeltsin. Another Life (2001), and Putin, the Leap Year (2001). He addressed the collective Soviet generational traumas in Private Chronicles. Monologue (1999). He filmed the lack of freedom under communist rule in Cuba in Patria o Muerte (Motherland or Death) (2011). He travelled along the Trans-Siberian gas pipeline by car in Truba (Pipeline) (2013). He showed the reality of the totalitarian propaganda machine in North Korea by filming undercover when invited there for an official visit in Under the Sun (2015).
What attracts him to these themes and close looks at authoritarianism, authoritarian countries and systems?
“It’s not so much films about Cuba and North Korea as countries, it’s more about freedom and unfreedom, about a society of people who have lost their freedom, a society of people who don’t understand the value of freedom.”
He explains that the same principle guides his latest work:
“I am, both as a human and as an author, worried about the acceptance and normalisation of the war, its slow penetration and weaving in our everyday lives. That’s why in my latest documentary I am looking at exactly these aspects.
The film I am shooting now is about this war entering our peaceful lives and our bloodstream. This contamination of blood with war, with militarisation in a healthy person who as a result becomes sick and more susceptible to external influences and also weaker, so to speak.”
I tell Mansky that maybe it’s impossible to absorb it all the time. You wake up, you read and read, and then you start to take care of yourself and your mental health.
He tells me about a near-death experience while shooting Pipeline: “At night, we were filming in the north, the heating went out in the car we were sleeping in. I remember how I started to realise in my sleep that I was freezing, but it happens in a dream, and you can’t wake yourself up in a dream. Because you are cold, you want to hide from this external pain, the cold, and to shrink and to go deep into this dream. And if you don’t wake yourself up....” His words trail off. “I miraculously woke myself up, I saved myself from death and the three people who were in the car with me by making myself wake up.
“European civilised society must force itself to wake up otherwise it will perish in its sleep. This sleep is like death for us, not for Ukraine. Ukraine is not sleeping, it is fighting, day and night. That’s the problem.”
I ask about Russian society. After Navalny’s death “I believe that the question of saving Russian society is not relevant now. Now it is necessary to help Ukraine win the war. This is the main issue on the agenda now. When Ukraine defends itself and wins, or when a ceasefire acceptable to Ukraine is signed, then maybe we should think about what should be done in Russia, with Russia.”
Director Vitaly Mansky believes documentary films should be used to spur democratic countries into action
CREDIT: Everett Collection Inc / Alamy
Mansky is currently working on two films in Latvia while promoting his latest documentary, Eastern Front, which was co-directed with the Ukrainian filmmaker Yevhen Titarenko and follows a brigade of volunteer paramedics who work directly in the war zone, providing a graphic depiction of the drastic consequences of Russian aggression in Ukraine.
I ask him if there is a future for filmmaking and art in general in Russia.
“I have a rather radical position here,” he says. “I think Russia is a completely unfree country, and I don’t believe that it is possible for a free artist to exist in Russia today and to realise their artistic projects, if the state knows about it. And it is quite difficult to do any artistic projects without the state knowing about it. It is possible, but difficult. Therefore, I believe that Russia is doomed now to create alternative underground art, samizdat and so on, like in the Soviet years or to develop controlled official art, which in one way or another will be a compromise and that is a very slippery slope in times of war.”
Mansky sees the role of a documentary filmmaker in waking society up whenever it falls into dogmatic slumber. That it is still possible for him to continue making and producing films despite all the obstacles is an inspiring testament of resilience.