The Humble Business of Revolution

To understand the Russian invasion of Ukraine, The Tyee has assembled a collection of documentaries that offer analysis of the history and culture of both countries. To put it very mildly, the two nations have a tumultuous and complex relationship. In order to gain a better understanding of the present, sometimes you have to look to the past.

Many of these auteur-driven documentaries contain the seeds of current events, from Putin’s war on the truth to the bloody conflict taking place on the streets of Ukrainian cities and towns. Violence, corruption and imperialist power coming to dark flower, watered with blood and suffering, have been germinating a long time.

But against this growing darkness are equally powerful forces — courage, compassion and in the case of the Ukrainian people, a cussed commitment to the cause of freedom.

Here are my picks for documentaries that bring nuance to the current picture of a country in crisis.

Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom

In the fall of 2013, after former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych failed to sign a promised agreement with the EU, opting instead for a closer alliance with Russia, a protest began in the streets of Kyiv. For 93 days, ordinary people — teachers, lawyers, doctors, students and little kids — battled the Berkut (the police riot squad) to bring about the promise of true democracy. The movement became known as the Revolution of Dignity.

Director Evgeny Afineevsky’s boots-on-the-ground film breaks down the action on a daily basis, with maps of Kyiv that detail the main points of conflict. The government’s failure to bring Ukraine closer to the EU was only part of what fuelled public outrage. There was a deeper and more fundamental cause at stake, namely freedom from tyranny. When the Berkut attacked students at the outset of the protest, beating young men and women with steel batons, the number of people determined to fight back swelled exponentially. An encampment was set up and battle lines were drawn, as Maidan (Independence) Square became the site and birthplace of the revolution.

First-person interviews with Ukrainian citizens are interspersed with footage of clashes between protesters and police. It is here, in the heaving tidal flow of bodies, filmed from on high, that the cost of struggle is rendered stark and clear. The beetle-black helmets and body armour of the Berkut stand in marked contrast to the raggedy DIY outfits of the protesters. They make for an arresting visual shorthand of the conflict.

After the government issued a law banning helmets because protesters had taken to wearing hardhats and bike helmets to protect themselves, people filled the streets wearing every conceivable type of headgear — including pots and pans on their heads. Footage, both amateur and professional, lends verité edge that is so raw it’s practically bleeding. In orange safety vests, motorcycle helmets and homemade shields, people are filmed, fighting and dying in the streets.

The thing that is most remarkable in a film that is packed to the hilt with drama is the courage of ordinary people. A young bellringer in St. Michael’s monastery alerts people to a Berkut attack by ringing every bell in the cathedral for the first time since the Mongol invasion in 1240. A 12-year-old kid takes a slingshot to the police. More than 125 people were killed in a series of brutal street battles, although a true number of casualties is unclear as many people disappeared.

Although there are few cinematic tropes that feel imposed in the narrative, the strings-heavy soundtrack being the most overt, the sheer scope of events overwhelms any trifles. It is the unbelievable toughness and bravery of the Ukrainians that lingers the longest. Under fire from police, protesters dragged their fallen comrades to safety, with little more than raw courage and a bike helmet to protect themselves. You do not fuck with these folks, as Russia is currently learning.

The film is available to screen on Netflix.

Maidan

Sergei Loznitsa’s film takes on the same territory as Winter on Fire, but in a more formally constructed way. Loznitsa uses his footage to fashion narratives that transcend the events on screen while somehow encompassing a deeper, older and more uneasy image of humanity. His film Blockade, which recreated the siege of Leningrad through archival materials, is one of the most devastating films I have ever seen.

Maidan often captures the conflict in the streets from lofty vantage points that give an almost painterly aspect to the action. The Renaissance quality of surging bodies en masse is met and matched by more intimate scenes, where protesters are filmed going about the humble business of creating a revolution — making sandwiches, piling up bricks and other hand-held missiles to be thrown at police. It is here, in these smaller, more personal moments, that the real fight for liberation hits home. It is human, messy, chaotic and also ridiculously inspiring.

The film is available to screen on iTunes.

The Russian Woodpecker

The April 1986 disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant is considered the worst nuclear accident of the 20th century. But what if it wasn’t an accident? This is the audacious premise of Chad Garcia’s documentary-cum-bizarro mystery tour.

A wild-haired Ukrainian artist by the name of Fedor Alexandrovich serves as a guide down the rabbit hole of Cold War malfeasance. The title of the film refers to a monstrous low-frequency radio transmitter built at the height of the Cold War, ostensibly deployed to disrupt western communications. The clicking/pecking noise that it produced gave rise to its nickname.

Although he might be charitably described as an unreliable narrator, Alexandrovich has serious gumption as he embarks on a series of interviews with ex-Soviet military men, scientists and party members seeking the truth behind the Chernobyl meltdown. The artist, the director and his fearless cameraman (who is later shot and almost killed in Maidan Square) set forth into the exclusion zone around Chernobyl to see what they could discover.

The tower, built at a cost of some $7 billion, was a resounding failure. In order to cover up this fact, the film makes the radical assertion that the Chernobyl accident was allowed to happen. Garcia’s film walks a fine line between conspiracy theory and possibly one of the strangest stories to emerge out of recent history, but it is eerily convincing.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine might have seemed an unlikely occurrence when the film first screened, but Alexandrovich’s predictions in the film now appear prescient. This fact lends additional credence to The Russian Woodpecker’s central argument that the Russian forces have long viewed Ukraine as expendable.

HyperNormalisation

Adam Curtis’s epic analysis contains one of the most curious takes on the Russian strategy of sowing chaos in order to cloud and confuse people’s sense of reality. The clip featured here provides a quick summation of the origins of this method with one Vladislav Surkov, an avant-garde artist and one of Putin’s closest advisors. Surkov proved that keeping people in a constant state of uncertainty, unable to discern what was real and what was fake, allowed the state to exert complete control behind the scenes. I cannot count the number of times I thought to myself when presented with another instance of warped and melting reality, “Curtis called it.”

The film is available to screen on YouTube.

Our New President

If you want to see Curtis’s assessment of Russian strangeness in action, director Maxim Pozdorovkin’s documentary collage examines just how far you can stretch the truth before it snaps back hard.

Pozdorovkin combines propaganda footage derived from news clips taken from Soviet state broadcasters alongside home videos from ordinary Russian people. Made on the eve of the 2016 U.S. election, it’s a capering, bedevilled reminder of conspiracy theory taken to its utmost extreme. You can’t make this shit up — or can you?

The film kicks off with a theory that a disinterred mummy of an ancient Russian princess placed an ancient curse on Hillary Clinton, causing her election loss to Trump. From there it’s a funhouse/horror show ride through what fake news has truly wrought. It’s not a pretty picture.

But behind all the silly drunken dancing and toasts to Trump’s macho prowess, something darker and more disturbing lurks. The success of this lunacy has proved equally successful outside of Russia. You need look no further than Fox News and its alternate take on reality.

Putin’s war on the media has been well established, but one of the most interesting things about Our New President is that it peeled away the Russian leader’s thin veneer of civility long before the recent meltdown of speech urging war on Ukraine.

What this gumbo mixture of propaganda television, conspiracy theory and homemade YouTube videos has created is a profound detachment from reality. In the current moment, Russian people are cut off from real news, even as very serious repercussions are taking place in their country. With Russia Today finally being removed from Canadian television screens, due to its function as a propaganda mouthpiece for Putin’s government, the war to control information rages on.

Our New President is available to screen on Amazon Prime and Kanopy.

There are many more films equally worth seeking out to gain a deeper understanding of the Ukrainian people.

The Babushkas of Chernobyl

Family Portrait in Black and White

Pit No. 8

Alisa in Warland

Taken as a collective, these different films offer a portrait of a country besieged by larger forces, and a people who, over generations, have had to practice and refine the art of resistance and resilience in a political context that is often on the verge of tearing them apart.