We need to talk about the influence of Russian culture
Tuesday 19 April 2022
The Independent Daily Edition
A Cannes Film Festival statement suggests that Ukraine is a place of terror while Russia is linked with dignity and protest. Something needs to change, writes Daria Badior
In May 2014, when the war in the east of Ukraine had only just started, I was at the Cannes Film Festival. It was warm, the sun was shining, and a screening, packed with cinephiles and critics, had just ended. I went out of the Palais and read the news: Russian soldiers had kidnapped people in Luhansk, captured administration buildings, and were battling around local airports. Two months previously, in March 2014, Russia occupied Crimea, and three months earlier, in February, almost 100 people were shot during the anti-government protests in the centre of Kyiv.
Ukrainian society was struggling to grasp its new reality – the reality of war. Unable to breathe, and fighting back tears, I looked for a place to hide and went to a church, which was almost empty. I am not a religious person, but in that church I thought about this deep contrast between the lives of people living in Donetsk and people at the festival in Cannes.
It was my third Cannes trip, and while the festival experience wasn’t an enjoyable one for me, I knew why I came: the cinema and its ability to reconcile us with the shakiness of the world in which we live. The cinema, for me, was always a window to the “other”, a lesson in empathy, offering visions of various life paths. And festivals, as I thought, especially the ones that want to establish the rules, should reflect this.
It was the first – but not the last – time the Cannes Film Festival, with all its fine selection of films, didn’t speak directly to me. Instead, it spoke to someone else, even though there were Ukrainian films on the programme – The Tribe by Myroslav Slaboshpitskiy and Maidan by Sergey Loznitsa – something was missing.
In 2022, the full-scale Russian invasion began in Ukraine. After three days on the road, together with my colleagues from the Kyiv Film Critics’ Week – a small film festival we run annually at the end of October – we wrote to our foreign colleagues. In fact, some of them wrote to us first, asking how we were and how they could help. We asked all of them to reconsider their attitude towards Russian cinema by helping to isolate Russia culturally while its troops were trying to occupy our country. We asked them to spread our letter among their colleagues.
Most of those to whom we wrote responded positively, showing an understanding of our request. I don’t know if they truly considered a personal reassessment of Russian cinema as one created in – and more often that not thanks to the the help of – a totalitarian regime. But there was one answer that stunned me, from Marion Dubois-Daras, the head of administration of the Syndicate Francais de la Critique de Cinema, with whom our festival had collaborated in 2020.
She sent me a press release of Semaine de la Critique (International Critics’ Week) and other parallel sections of Festival de Cannes, and it did not differ much from the festival’s own statement. The first mentions “Ukrainian people, fighting today for their freedom”, while the second says: “Ukrainian artists and film industry professionals, as well as their families whose lives are now in danger. There are those whom we’ve never met, and those whom we’ve come to know and welcomed to Cannes, who came with works that say much about Ukraine’s history and the present.”
The following six paragraphs of the official statement, however, are dedicated to the Russian cinema professionals and their fate in the Cannes context.
“Unless the war of assault ends in conditions that will satisfy the Ukrainian people, it has been decided that we will not welcome official Russian delegations nor accept the presence of anyone linked to the Russian government,” reads the statement.
The films, however, might remain, especially if they are made by those Russian filmmakers who condemn the war and try to separate themselves from Putin’s regime. “Among them are artists and film professionals who have never ceased to fight against the contemporary regime, who cannot be associated with these unbearable actions and those who are bombing Ukraine.”
Why don’t they ask Ukraine’s representatives whom to associate the bombings and mass killings to? Why don’t the authors of such a statement treat Ukrainian filmmakers as equally important as Russian?
The real statement, of course, is the official programme announced on 14 April. There is one Ukrainian film in the official selection: Butterfly Vision, Maksym Nakonechniy’s first feature which will be shown in the Un Certain Regard section. It is a story about a young female soldier Lia who comes back home after two months of being held captive. She discovers that she is pregnant after a warden raped her and has to make a decision.
All in all, 2022 should have been a good year for Ukrainian auteur cinema, with many stories to tell, including ones about the war (Maryna Er Gorbach’s Klondike, for example, took part in the Feature Competition in Sundance in January).
Another question is how many Ukrainian filmmakers finished their works in the circumstances of war, and how many of them will be present at film festivals next year? This year there will be a section dedicated to Ukrainian cinema in the Cannes market, and producers will present their projects in search of financing.
Sergey Loznitsa, whose new film, Natural History of Destruction, will be shown in the Special Screening programme, identifies himself as a Ukrainian filmmaker. However, his recent films appear not to be Ukrainian co-productions, and since Donbass (2018), his participation in the Ukrainian film industry has been insignificant.
Meanwhile, there is a Russian film in the main competition: Tchaikovsky’s Wife by Kirill Serebrennikov will fight for the Palme d’Or. The festival’s artistic director, Therry Fremaux called Serebrennikov a “dissident cineaste” in a recent interview. “We always have to separate the artistic vocation of Cannes from the collective and political issues that are going on around the world. But obviously, political events are often reflected in films we show at Cannes because artists are making movies with social, political and environmental themes,” he states in another interview, answering a question about the war in Ukraine and the festival’s response to it.
I ask myself: if I went to Cannes this year, how would I react to the word “Russia” that will mark those films in programmes and press kits? I’m afraid the gap between the reality on the Croisette and the reality of my country would be the size of a black hole. How could this country, invading Ukraine, killing civilians in Bucha, Irpin, and Mariupol, still be presented at the Cannes Film Festival, which, as the statement says, denounces “violence, repression, and injustices, for the main purpose to defend peace and liberty”?
How come, until recently, Russia was presented at the Croisette via “official delegations” – during and after the atrocities in Syria, occupation of Crimea, and the wars in Eastern Ukraine and Georgia? What level of violation of liberty is needed to suspend a country’s participation in such a prominent event?
Moreover, I wonder if suspending or boycotting Russian cinema of official state institutions for a while are adequate measures for such a situation? Europe is now experiencing a full-scale war on its territory that will influence the world: Ukraine is a big wheat and vegetable oil exporter in Africa, for example, and the Russian aggression will destroy these distribution networks. Obviously, culture has to do something with that according to its very definition.
For the last few years, there has been a heated discussion about the hierarchies that create and legitimise the structures of our everyday life. Prominent cultural institutions were asked about their imperial past and about their attitude towards the newest stances on inequality and systemic injustice. In particular, museums are asked about their collections, many objects of which were looted from colonies in the past. As Ariella Azoulay argues, museums need to be decolonised, along with the world itself. The bigger the institution is, the harsher the questions might be. After all, Marvel comics teach us that with great power comes great responsibility, and this is definitely the case with culture.
There was also heated discourse on representation in cinema. Cannes Film Festival was among the last to accent gender representation in its programmes (still, there are only three female directors on the main competition this year so far: Kelly Reichardt, Claire Denis and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi). That discussion, media campaign, and the shift of power that came after, I believe, led to the triumph of female directors in Cannes (Julie Ducournau with Titan) and Venice last year (Audrey Diwan with Happening) and in Berlin in 2020 (Carla Simón with Alcarràs). Those films emphasised women’s experience, the female gaze, and topics previously shown from the male perspective.
I believe that we need to have a similar discussion on eastern Europe and the so-called “Post-Soviet.” Eastern Europe – Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Slovak Republic, among others – deserve the right to tell nuanced stories. Judging from the Cannes statement, Ukraine is marked as “the territory” where one’s life can be in danger. Meanwhile, Russian filmmakers are associated with “courage” and “taking risks.” I believe that wording is important because such words structure people’s attitude towards Ukraine. This language seems to paint Ukraine as a place of terror that lacks agency. At the same time, despite the horror it brings, Russia is linked with dignity and protest. Where does the border of such language lie? On the Ukrainian border? On the margins of an “Iron Curtain”?
Decolonising prominent cultural institutions means not simply marking one country as an empire and the other as a colony (in the eastern European situation, these markings are fluid, complex, and require an intellectual precision), but also giving voice to those who aren’t present as much as the “imperial” representatives in the media, festival programmes, and university curriculums. By putting Russian and Ukrainian filmmakers in the same statements, panel discussions, and thematic programmes, in my opinion, film festivals continue to spotlight the former and diminish the latter.
I believe that the time has come for a nuanced conversation about the influence of Russian culture, politics, and money on Europe, and an expansion of what is believed to be “Russian art”. Russian culture is in the process of reinventing itself, I hope, into a non-aggressive, non-imperialistic, non-toxic one – but that remains to be seen. Meanwhile, we in eastern Europe can have a conversation about our own culture ourselves, without paying any attention to Russia – and it would be the most interesting one in the room.
This conversation is possible when those managing film festivals reflect upon their own roles in the film industry and its cultural ecosystem, upon representation in their selection committees, and upon the agency given to or taken away from artists by such institutions. I would invite the Festival de Cannes, the Berlinale and the Venice Mostra to join this discussion.
Daria Badior, critic, editor, journalist (Ukraine)