(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
The private is as known politically, at least in the recent films of documentary filmmaker Vitalij Manskij.
I Under the sun (2015) he had been allowed to film a family in North Korea, on condition that he followed detailed instructions from the country's authorities – who had also selected the family itself for him. But Mansky secretly chose to let the camera go between the public pre-written and directed the scenes, thus giving the film an interesting and unique insight behind the country's strictly controlled facade.
The private is political for Vitalij Manskij.
This time, the experienced filmmaker has chosen to point the camera at his own family, also this time in a distinctly political film. IN Close Relations he has visited and filmed his family members in Ukraine for one year, from May 2014 to May 2015. These live as different places as Donbass, Lviv, Odessa and Sevastopol, in the east, west, south and Crimean peninsula respectively. With such scattered subjects, the documentary manages to draw a multifaceted portrait of the country in the wake of the Maidan demonstrations and the subsequent revolution in 2014, where new turmoil and upheaval continues.
The legacy of the Soviet. Mansky was himself born and raised in the city of Lviv in the west of Ukraine, while the country was still part of the Soviet Union. As a young adult, he moved to Moscow to study film, and resided there until the union disintegrated. For that reason, in the subsequent years he considered himself to be Russian, without thinking much more about the matter. As he himself says in the film, it was difficult for the children of the Soviet Union to imagine a world where the former Soviet states were strictly separated by national borders.
However, in a Ukraine ruled between the EU in the west and Putin's Russia in the east, a reality that looks quite different is expected.
Deep splits. Manski's tour begins in his childhood Lviv, where the aging mother now likes to speak Ukrainian instead of Russian to express her national pride. But when she tells that his grandmother was a "Lithuanian Pole", the filmmaker naturally begins to question what has really made the family Ukrainian.
However, he also has relatives in the pro-Russian parts of the country, and the film shows how this has created deep divisions in the family. And if his residence address at the fall of the Soviet Union was a relatively random reason why Mansky called himself Russian, geography seems to be quite governing for one's loyalty in this conflict – simply because it is experienced quite differently depending on which part of the country one lives in. .
Russians in exile. I then signed the film at the Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival, which devoted a separate retrospective to Mansky. "From an early age, we are told that we should die for our country. But why can we not live for our country? ” asked the director rhetorically when he met the press at the Greek festival. Here he emphasized that he still considers himself a Russian filmmaker, despite the fact that he now lives and works in Latvia. Mansky is said to have chosen to leave Russia and his hometown Moscow as a result of the events he depicts in the film, and which he describes in the narrative track as "his personal tragedy".
In Thessaloniki, he went on to say that he would rather let life decide for himself which direction his films take, rather than follow a script. IN Close Relations this meant some dramatic events, not least on the eventually Russian-annexed Crimean peninsula, which none of those involved in the film could foresee.
"Why can we not live for our country, but only die for it?"
Seriousness and absurdity. Mansky nevertheless maintains the main focus on the daily lives of the various family members. He captures this with breathtaking static images, while getting his relatives to talk about the turbulent political development in the country – something that naturally preoccupies them to a large extent. With this is Close Relations a quite talkative film that can sometimes be demanding to watch, perhaps especially for those of us who do not already have particularly in-depth knowledge of the political developments the film follows. Nevertheless, the documentary is effective as an in-depth study of life in Ukraine during this very period. Not least, it offers an interesting insight into how different the ongoing conflict is for the people in the various regions – including separatist-ruled Donbass in the east of the country.
It is obvious throughout the film that director Mansky has a lot of love for the people he films, and deep respect for the seriousness of what they go through. Still, he takes care of a refreshing look for the slightly absurd moments that occur along the way. A good example of this is when the family in Sevastopol celebrates New Year's Eve with speeches by two different presidents and two different national anthems one hour apart, because Russia is in a different time zone.
Hot conflict. During the year the recordings are in progress, the conflict escalates constantly, and the daily life depicted is characterized by this. For example, when two young women in a café in Lviv at Christmas time talk about how the number of deaths in the war has been reduced to pure statistics, while a long military parade fills the street right outside. When spring finally comes, one of the filmmaker's own family members, a 20-year-old boy, is also called up for military service. To put it in Mansky's words in the film, it is known in Ukraine in 2015 that this is not an exercise.
The private is so decidedly political in Close Relations. More than just portraying the director's own family, Mansky's film brings us a little closer to an understanding of the profound historical upheaval in Ukraine, and what it means to live in it.
Watch the movie here.
