(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
In eastern Ukraine, the fierce conflict between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian government forces has claimed more than 10 000 life after Moscow annexed the Ukrainian Crimean Peninsula in March 2014. Documentary filmmakers who report on the events in the region will never be able to come up with one common way of thinking. The footage is available (here raw front footage made by a Ukrainian military doctor who worked as a film director before the war – his according to the guerre Director is Russian for "film director"); the perspective – from the government or the rebels; tone – none of this can be neutral, and War for Peace is no exception.
Withdrawed from festival. The film was supposed to have a Russian premiere in December at the Artdocfest, a festival organized in Moscow by renowned Ukrainian-born documentary director Vitalij Manskij. But the screening of another movie about the Ukraine conflict, Beata Bubenets' Flight of a Bullet (a chronicle of combat operations by the controversial Aidar battalion – which was later disbanded following Amnesty International's accusations of war crimes), was interrupted after riots. After that it became War for Peace, which also includes interviews with members of the Aidar battalion, removed from the program, even though the producers had found a "safe territory" – the Czech Embassy in Moscow – to show the film there.
[...] none of this can be neutral, and War for Peace is no exception.
War for Peace (the film's Russian title Soldier for peace really means "War for the cause of peace") can be said to be a little less controversial than Flight of a Bullet (in Russian: Polyot pulley), as it follows health professionals with a duty to save lives. However, this was not enough to calm the heated feelings of the Prorussian activists from Russia's nationalist group SERB (South-East Radical Block), which stormed into the October theater in early December, threw a coat over the projector and released health-threatening gas in the showroom.
Campaign. When the Czech Embassy declared that it could not guarantee the safety of the public during a screening of War and Peace, manufacturers pulled it and are now using the event as part of a broader marketing campaign.
"Russian officials and unknown, masked persons prevented the screening of a film about the Russian-Ukrainian war," the press release for the film states.
"The documentary War for Peace of Ukrainian director Jevhen Titarenko (Dnipro, Ukraine) was actually presented at a special screening at the Artdocfest International Film Festival in Moscow, Russia, December 8, 2017. »
"However, after the film's screening date was announced, a negative campaign was launched against the film by high-ranking members of the Russian parliament, the Attorney General's Office, the Ministry of Culture, the FSB (security service), through media outlets and discussions in central Russian television.
channels. "
"The management of Artdocfest decided to make a display in the Czech cultural center in the area of the Czech Embassy, but the center had to reject the proposal because it could not guarantee the public's safety."
If all the fuss was worth it, viewers have to decide for themselves. Artistically, the film is a mix of front-page news footage, conversations with contestants being interrupted by handgun gunshots or the deadly explosion of a nearby grenade, and adrenaline-producing footage of ambulances during fire and at furious speed.
As gripping as the footage is, the film is – inevitably – biased in a conflict where, in a more distant perspective, there are no winners, possibly apart from the political capital both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko get out of this dirty chaos.
The speed and immediateness of handheld cameras make it a captivating experience to be a spectator: men and women who run under fire to grab severely injured comrades, uninhibited comments, singing, audacity – and nauseating fears when harsh attacks bring death and destruction.
A tragic movie about a tragic conflict.
The other side. Titarenko understands that such a film needs brighter moments – like the soldier 800 meters from the front line near Donetsk who is unsure how to tighten the spring on Kalashnikov's magazine clamp. The comrade picks up a laptop to search YouTube for videos with the keywords "how to charge a magazine for a Kalashnikov" (and comes up with an old training movie in black and white from the US military). Or the female volunteer doctor who scolds her comrades after three of them throw themselves at her during an attack, shouting at them: "What's a big loss – three of you or one of me ?!" The men answer in unison: "You! There are lots of us. "
When you see this close-up portrait of struggling men and women at the front, trying to stay alive and shooting at the separatist forces defending the outskirts of the destroyed airport in Donetsk, one understands that an almost identical movie could have been made from the other side, where men armed with the same Soviet-designed weapons would tell the same stories of passionate belief in the defense of their homeland and with the same disdain for the enemy's life.
With undisturbed footage of hard – in some cases fatal – injured men, including an experienced war photographer who dies after a hit by a bomber, is War for Peace a tragic movie about a tragic conflict.
