Political Cinema in Venice
There were a number of remarkable films this year that dealt with political themes. In his docudrama ‘The Order’, Australian Justin Kurzel shows the beginnings of fascist violence in America as a gripping thriller. In the 1980s, a well-organised gang terrorises the American Northwest with a series of brutal attacks on banks and money transporters. FBI agent Terry Husk (Jude Law) discovers a political pattern behind the seemingly unconnected actions and links them to the Aryan Nations, a fundamentalist religious group that preaches white supremacy and xenophobia.
While their leader Richard Butler (Victor Slezak) advocates the path through the institutions and trusts that right-wing extremists will soon be sitting in Congress and the Senate, a radical group around Bob Matthews (Nicolas Hoult) splits off and calls for an armed uprising. They call themselves ‘The Order’ and use the money from the robberies to stockpile weapons and prepare for a violent overthrow. Justin Kurzel stages the real-life story, based on the non-fiction book ‘The Silent Brotherhood’ by Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt, as a fast-paced action drama.
Jude Law is great as a burnt-out FBI agent with a moustache who has travelled from New York to the mountains of Idaho and Washington, while Nicolas Hoult as a convinced ideologue and charismatic leader swears his people to the idea of white supremacy. As we learn in the end credits, the actions of ‘The Order’ later served as inspiration for the attack on the federal building in Oklahoma, the Nazi march in Charlottesville and the storming of the Capitol on 7 January 2021. In retrospect, we can say that both Butler and Matthews were right - both strategies worked. There is right-wing violence on the streets and a presidential candidate with a potential fascist agenda.
The Brazilian Walter Salles opts for a completely different kind of dramatisation for his historical drama ‘Ainda estou aqui’ (I'm Still Here). Rio de Janeiro 1971, the years of the military dictatorship. We see Rubens Paiva's family, four daughters and a son, happily playing volleyball on the beach. At the same time, we suspect that the idyll could be an illusion. One day, men in leather jackets turn up and take Rubens with them to ‘make a statement’. He will never turn up again. Rubens Pavia was a congressman for the Labour Party, had lived abroad for several years and was active in the resistance against the military regime. His wife Eunice is also arrested, interrogated and held for days in a windowless cell.
Left to fend for herself, she has to look after her five children. There is no longer enough money for a housekeeper. Eunice searches tirelessly for the whereabouts of her husband. It is not until the 1990s that his death is officially confirmed. The formerly apolitical woman studies law at the age of 48 and becomes a prominent human rights lawyer. Fernanda Torres fills the role with outstanding charisma and was considered the favourite for the acting award.
Walter Salles, who knew the family personally and used to play with the Paiva children, worked on the film for seven years. It was the time of President Jair Bolsonaro, who repeatedly expressed his admiration for the military dictatorship, which gives the project a disturbing urgency. The book by the son, Marcelo Rubens Pavia, who came to Venice in person, served as the basis for the film.
Walter Salle's great mastery lies in the fact that he creates an atmosphere of threat without showing direct violence or torture. Hints, conversations and sounds are enough to suggest an all-encompassing danger. At the same time, by staging the cheerful family and their numerous guests, he creates an antithesis to the murderous violence that dominates the country. When the house has to be sold after the father's disappearance and the family moves to Sao Paulo, this idyll comes to an end.
In the French film ‘Jouer avec le feu’ (Playing With Fire), a family is also at the centre of the story. Vincent Lindon plays a railwayman and single father of two half-grown sons. Fus (Benjamin Voisin), the older of the two, breaks off his training as a metalworker and plays football successfully, while his younger brother (Stefan Crepon), rather shy and reserved, concentrates on school.
After winning a football match, Pierre sees his son celebrating with a group of right-wing skinheads. His attempts to confront Fus fail. While Louis passes the entrance exam to the Sorbonne in Paris, his brother slips further and further into the right-wing scene. For anyone who has children of their own, it is painful to see how all of Pierre's efforts to keep the family together remain unsuccessful.
The film by sisters Delphine Coulin and Muriel Coulin, who also wrote the screenplay, is based on the novel ‘Ce qu'il faut de nuit’ by Laurent Petitmangin. The setting is a deindustrialised region in Lorraine, where only the ruins of a steelworks remain as a reminder of its former industrial splendour. Anyone who wants to better understand why Marine le Pen's radical right-wing Rassemblement National is so successful in France should watch this film.
One of the highlights of the festival was the devastating documentary film ‘Russians at War’. Without official permission, the Russian-Canadian author Anastasia Trofimova accompanies a Russian unit to the front. For seven months, she documents the everyday life of soldiers in a Russian infantry battalion with her camera. Her observations and interviews provide an unfiltered picture of the reality of war beyond the heroic propaganda of the Russian media.
She meets soldiers who have been conscripted or have volunteered for patriotic or financial reasons. What they all have in common is a deep sense of disillusionment. ‘It's so confusing here. I don't know what we're actually fighting for,’ says one of them. An assessment that is shared by many of his comrades. When Anastasia Trofimova meets the unit, just 300 of the 900 soldiers have returned from their last deployment on the front. The sequence towards the end of the film when the unit is sent to the front for an attack in Bakhmut is particularly distressing. Most of the soldiers will not come back alive.
Trofimova's film was immediately denounced by the Ukrainians as ‘Russian propaganda’. Producer Darya Bassel, whose film 'Songs of Slow Burning Earth' also screened in Venice, criticised the festival for inviting ‘Russians at War’ at all and accused the film of 'white washing’ the Russian soldiers. Trofimova pointed out that she wanted to show what was missing in the media coverage, ‘the human face of those involved in this war.(...) Normally we don't see the perspective of Russian soldiers. It was important to me to take a look behind the fog of war and to focus on the tragedy that war means, I wanted to show people as human beings, beyond black and white political images and war propaganda.’
Postscript
Following Venice, ‘Russians at War’ has also been invited to Toronto. The Ukrainian Consul General Oleh Nikolenko called on the festival not to show the film and criticised the fact that the film was subsidised by the Canadian Media Fund.
