Andrei Nekrasov's docmentary on the 2008 conflict between Russia and Georgia has already caused controversy in his native Russia. The film-maker dissident is used to it. By Geoffrey Macnab
Outspoken Russian director Andrei Nekrasov has dismissed charges in the Russian media that he is anti-Russian. Speaking to the Daily Tiger from Sundance (where his new film Russian Lessons screened earlier this week), Nekrasov said he considered himself “a Russian patriot.”
The St. Petersburg-based director also revealed that, since he made the film, he has been receiving threatening emails. There have also been hostile articles about him on Russian websites. The director has been accused of being a traitor to his country and a “Russophobe”. Last year, his house in Finland was vandalised and burgled in mysterious circumstances. At the same time as being vilified in Russia, Nekrasov has become a near national hero in Georgia, where he recently won a “Person Of The Year” award.
Nekrasov co-directed Russian Lessons with Olga Konskaya (who died of cancer last May, at the age of 44, before the film was completed.) The documentary, a European premiere in IFFR’s Spectrum, explores the causes of the war between Russia and Georgia in August of 2008. It questions the official Russian account of the war – an account that has been accepted by many in the Western media. The second half of the film looks at the media manipulation and propaganda that accompanied the war.
“Unless you talk honestly, Russia will continue to decay,” the filmmaker stated of his film’s trenchant analysis of Russian imperialism. He said that incidents such as the Russian invasion of Georgia “reinforce those who I think are damaging Russia… the people who only care about their own power.” The director said that he hoped Russian Lessons would show audiences what Georgia was really like. “We wanted people to get to know Georgia and to convey what we feel, which is that they [the Georgian people] are very generous and tolerant. They are not aggressive.”
When Nekrasov was growing up in Soviet-era Russia, Georgia was regarded with huge affection by Russians. “The Georgians were like the Italians of the Soviet Union, with joie de vivre. Everybody loved them.”
Dissenting voices
The director argued that the difference between the Russians and the Georgians is that the Georgians “do accept [an] opposite point of view”. Many Georgians have criticised their own government’s handling of the war and have drawn attention to acts of aggression committed by their country in South Ossetia in the 1990s. Nekrasov argues that the freedom of speech present in Georgia simply doesn’t exist in Russia. He also said that all his own painstaking research pointed to Russian aggression.
Nekrasov’s recent documentaries have been fiercely critical of human rights abuses and political skulduggery in contemporary Russia. Disbelief accused the Russian government of being behind the terrorist bombings in Russia in 1999, Rebellion: The Litvinenko Case explored the circumstances leading up to the murder of Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006.
Nekrasov and Konskaya were both on the front line during the conflict. “The war was in the air. Everybody was talking about it. Now, it is presented to the international community by Russia as an unwarranted, sudden, unexpected and insidious attack by Georgia. It was nothing of the kind.”
Early in his career, Nekrasov was an assistant on The Sacrifice, the final film by Andrei Tarkovsky. On the face of it, there is a huge gulf between Tarkovsky’s spiritual approach to filmmaking and the polemical documentaries that Nekrasov is making today. However, the director argues that Tarkovsky’s cinema was dissident in its own way too.
“As a very young man, I wanted to be a poet like Tarkovsky”, Nekrasov says. “Somebody of Tarkovsky’s temperament, had he lived today, would maybe have acted like me… if you look deeper into his work and train of thought, you realise he was a dissenter.”
More on Russian Lessons.