The Venice Film Festival presented a Russian documentary that shows the Russian-Ukrainian war through the lens of Russian soldiers. This was reported by Komersant ukrainskyi
reports with reference to Reuters.
Anastasia Trofimova, the Russian-Canadian director of the film Russians at War , spent seven months living with Russian soldiers near the front line. She said she wanted to challenge stereotypes about Russian soldiers.
“In Russia, they are heroes who never die. In the West, they are mostly considered war criminals,”
– she told journalists before the premiere.
The filmmaker allegedly worked without official permission in a battalion that invaded eastern Ukraine (“that was making its way through eastern Ukraine”, in Reuters’ terminology). This gave her an up-close look at an often poorly organised army in a state of constant disarray.
The film shows outdated weaponry, soldiers travelling in vehicles that offer little protection from attack, and an incident in which a drone operator dropped a bomb on his own. The only things that are plentiful are cigarettes and alcohol.
Many soldiers admit that they are only fighting for money and are becoming increasingly frustrated as the war drags on. They call the state media’s coverage of the war a “lie”.
Others, according to the filmmaker, are fighting out of brotherhood, and their attitudes are becoming tougher as the number of casualties (on the Russian side) increases.
“People [Russians] may not fully understand the reasons for the war, but they start fighting because they have lost someone. And maybe it’s a matter of revenge,”
– trofimova said.
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The film shows the work of medics collecting bodies from the battlefield and their tears when three of their unit are brought in black bags. In this way, the film humanises the Russian occupiers, each of whom certainly bears a share of the blame for all the crimes and the genocidal war against Ukraine as a whole.
The film shows only short episodes of actual fighting. What it does not show is the crimes and destruction the occupiers committed in Ukraine. One of the soldiers dismissed as “impossible” the accusations that Russian troops had committed war crimes. The filmmaker also saw no signs of war crimes during her time near the front.
“I think this is what the Western media associates Russian soldiers with, because there were no other stories. This is a different story,”
– she said.
Another documentary screened in Venice, Songs of a Slowly Burning Land, showed Ukraine’s suffering, and its Ukrainian director Olga Zhurba criticised the decision to screen the Russian film, saying it was not appropriate to portray the invaders in a sympathetic light.
Trofimova rejected this criticism, saying that it was necessary not to incite hatred further, but to “look for a common language”.
“Since the start of the war on 24 February 2022, many bridges between Russia and the West have been destroyed. I would like this film to become, maybe not a bridge, but at least a rope that I can throw to help us see each other,”
– said the Russian woman.
Thus, the point of view of Russian propagandists was successfully demonstrated at one of the most prestigious international film festivals. This is a film about poor Russian soldiers who are suffering unspeakably in this protracted war, which should have ended with Ukraine’s surrender in three days.