Russians at War
Anastasia Trofimova is a young Russian filmmaker born in Moscow but raised in Toronto. She has made documentaries and short films in significant war zones: Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Congo, Senegal, Guinea, Serbia, Bosnia and other countries. ‘Russians At War’ is her seventh documentary, presented out of competition at the 81st Venice International Film Festival. Trofimova managed to gain access to the Russian frontline of the War against Ukraine without being officially accredited by joining a group of doctors and paramedics behind the rear, from where she filmed the conflict from the lesser-known first-hand side for a whole year. She collected soldiers’ testimonies and filmed the harsh and dramatic daily life on the front. ‘The most interesting thing,’ commented artistic director Alberto Barbera,’ is to follow over a year the passage from the often uncritical, sometimes even voluntary, adhesion of these soldiers to the patriotic motivations of Russian propaganda, to the total disillusionment after having experienced at first hand the senselessness of the conflict and the falsehoods of Russian propaganda. “Russians at War” tries to go beyond the headlines to discover the actual conditions of the Russian soldiers, who, voluntary or not, day after day fight for reasons that appear increasingly obscure to them, increasingly aware that everything they have heard about the war in the Russian media is false. Doubting their purpose, they fight only to survive. Trofimova first had to expatriate to Canada and then to France to edit the film.
