“Sometimes we go forwards a few steps and then we take a few steps backwards,” reflects Russian filmmaker Evgeny Mitta. “You know, with Russia, it is really hard to predict. I remember when in ’84, people would sit in their kitchens in Moscow discussing how long the Soviet state would continue and [saying] maybe 100 years. Then, in ’86, it starts shaking and then [in 1991] it completely disappears.”
Mitta’s new documentary Catch 2012 chronicles the street protests in Moscow and other Russian cities in 2011-2012 when Vladimir Putin was campaigning in the fiercely disputed elections to be re-elected President. There was much fury about vote rigging in his favour.
The film looks at what happened to some of the activists whose lives were turned upside down during those protests in Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square and elsewhere. It has an added topicality now given the recent arrest of opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
Among the subjects is one young protester thrown into prison. His account of his sentence sounds like something which might have been written by Dostoevsky in the 19th Century. He was charged with violence against the police and ended up serving three and a half years. “Prison is, in fact, an aggressive environment,” the prisoner says with evident understatement as he describes the brutal caste system behind bars. There are the “regular” prisoners (the ordinary decency criminals), there are the political activists and there are the “pinschers,” the people most despised and who are treated as “slaves.” They are the “untouchables” who work in the sewers and clean the toilets.
The film is one of two human rights-based documentaries on the slate of Moscow-based sales outfit, Antipode. The other is Kirill Nenashev’s People Who Differ, which looks at the new wave of anti-Putin protests in 2017-2018. It explores the hopes and beliefs of Navalny’s supporters and examines how the opposition movement keeps on going in the face of huge pressure and intimidation from the authorities.
Catch 2012 follows on from Mitta’s Act & Punishment, his earlier doc about the subversive all-female Russian rock band, Pussy Riot, which he shot over several years. When he was working with Pussy Riot, Mitta was out on the streets with his camera, often filming the protest camps. Very little of the material was actually used in the doc. He was keen to revisit the footage and, in 2017, came up with the idea of interviewing participants and seeing how their lives had been changed in the intervening years.
Mitta is an artist and former gallery curator as well as a filmmaker. His work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale. He was the co-founder of First Gallery in the late 1980s and later of The Paperworks Gallery.
Catch 2012 has been shown as part of an art installations in Germany as well as in cinemas. It also screened at ArtDoc Fest in Moscow and on independent TV channel Dozhd (TV Rain) but didn’t secure mainstream distribution. “The newspapers are not writing about these kind of movies,” he notes.
The director finances his documentaries himself, working on tight budgets. On Catch 2012, he was helped by two editors, Taisia Krugovykh (who shot videos for Pussy Riot) and Daniil Zinchenko.
No, Mitta didn’t start out as a filmmaker. He studied stage design. However, his father Alexander Mitta is a distinguished film director who, in the Soviet era, won the Grand Prize in Venice for his feature They’re Calling, Open The Door. He therefore grew up around cameras and movie making was in the blood.
Mitta is currently working on a documentary series about Russian experimental artist and writer, Pavel Pepperstein, With a working title of Pepperstein’s Surreality Show, the doc series will be completed shortly.
