Photo: Annegret Sachse
German filmmaker Annegret Sachse refers to her self-produced documentary essay Russia today as “an act of personal, cultural resistance against political alienation”. The feature doc is selected for 2020 East Silver Market.
In Autumn 2017 Sachse undertook an odyssey, together with friend and sound recordist Yulia Glukhova, into the former German enclave of Königsberg, now Kaliningrad since it became part of the Soviet Union in 1946.
The pair had met at a documentary workshop in 2013 and stayed in touch, eager to work and travel together. That opportunity arose after Sachse’s successful pitch of her idea to paint a personal portrait of contemporary Russia at goEast Film Festival’s Oppose Othering Workshop in 2016, after which it received financial support from the Berlin Funding Program for Women Artists in Film/Video as well as from the Film Office Bremen in 2017. Russia today is co-produced by the Russian Olga Yakovleva of august 26th studio.
The film’s logline states how the film offers “everyday observations of a region, its inhabitants, a nation – often associative, sometimes metaphorical, rarely unfamiliar,” before the director lists what the pair witnessed en route; runners, numbers, applause, fishermen, horses, ploughs, aggression, migration, surveillance, love, two spiders and one ring of power, she adds temptingly. “Fragments of conversations create a temporary space for personal encounters,” Sachse comments. “The audience is invited to enter and connect.”
The director further notes how her film formally positions itself along the intersections of films such as Shelly Silver’s Former East/Former West (1992), Chantal Akerman’s From the East (1993), Ruth Beckermann’s American Passages(2011), Kirstin Johnson’s Cameraperson (2016) and Deborah Stratman’s Illinois Parables (2017).
“In 2016, following the annexation of Crimea and the invasion of Ukraine, the political, economic and cultural alienation between Russia and the West became increasingly obvious,” further comments Berlin-based Sachse, who was born in former East Germany, of the work’s raison d’être. “Like many others, it filled me with growing concern. One of my grandfathers had left behind a diary describing his experience of World War II and subsequent imprisonment in Soviet labour camps until 1948. The other grandfather lost a brother on Soviet soil whose remains were never found. The letters his parents wrote to the front were returned unopened and sit in my aunt’s cupboard like that till today.”
“During research and filming, I came to understand the act of making this documentary – together with a Russian friend, in Russia, communicating with Russian protagonists – as an act of personal, cultural resistance against political alienation,” she avers. “Our film wants to build a bridge at a time when too many bridges have been burnt.”
Sachse will be a participant at IDFAcademy 2020.
