RIDM | Vitaly Mansky: the revenge of the witness

We do not always measure the scope of an event when it is happening, when we are in the heat of the moment. However, Russian documentary filmmaker Vitaly Mansky cannot explain why he waited 18 years before devoting a film to the rise of Vladimir Putin.

At the very beginning of the documentary Putin’s Witnesses (which can be translated by Putin’s witnesses), the filmmaker, to whom the Rencontres internationales du documentaire de Montréal (RIDM) is dedicating a retrospective this year, presents images of his family on the evening of December 31, 1999.

While on television, Boris Yeltsin hands over the reins of the country to Vladimir Poutine, the filmmaker’s wife is devastated, convinced to witness the return of a strong man who will tighten the screws on the Russians. ” It’s a disaster. One day, we will remember the Yeltsin years as years of happiness, like a utopia, ”she says. Behind the camera, the filmmaker says he shares his opinion.

Dans les mois qui ont suivi, Vitaly Mansky a eu un accès privilégié à Vladimir Poutine et a préparé pour la télévision russe un documentaire sur le nouveau dirigeant.

Il était là, le soir de son élection, en mars 2000, une élection planifiée jusque dans les moindres détails par un cercle rapproché. Il a marché à son côté dans le Kremlin, parlant de l’avenir du pays.

Pendant que la caméra roulait, le cinéaste a posé à Vladimir Poutine des questions qui trahissaient ses craintes de voir son pays retourner en arrière. Se faisant rassurant, le nouveau président lui a alors chanté les louanges de la démocratie et affirmé qu’il n’enviait en rien la vie des monarques. Il disait rêver du jour où il vivrait à nouveau comme un citoyen ordinaire, éprouvant les effets de ses propres décisions.

Plus de deux décennies plus tard, alors que Vladimir Poutine est toujours au pouvoir et que son opposition est plus que jamais écrasée, Vitaly Mansky porte un regard dur sur son propre rôle dans le retour d’une autocratie en Russie. « Le consentement tacite transforme les témoins en complices », l’entend-on dire aussi à la fin du documentaire. Il soulève là une réflexion qui taraude plus d’un journaliste, plus d’un documentariste.

« Longtemps, j’ai eu la conviction folle que tout pouvait changer [en Russie], that everything could be overcome, ”he said today in an interview in the hall of the Cinémathèque québécoise. ” Putin’s Witnesses appeared when I realized my loss. It is a personal admission of my failure and an acknowledgment of my responsibility for what happened. ”

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Today, it is the silence of his fellow citizens that saddens him. “The silence of the Russians is the main tragedy today, and it is the great victory of the Kremlin,” he said.

Vitaly Mansky, he makes his images speak. High and loud. His work is celebrated around the world, but in Russia he is bearing the brunt of the gradual curtailment of freedom of expression. ” My movie Putin’s Witnesses has never been seen in all the territory of Russia, although I was even able to show this film in Iran ”, he gives by way of example.

President of Artdocfest, a documentary festival founded in Moscow in 2007, he is having more and more difficulty building a program for Russian festival-goers.

The director moved to Riga, neighboring Latvia, in 2014.

“When I left in 2014, there was still no ban on saying what we thought, but I could no longer stay physically in this energy zone. The wave that covered the Russian people with happiness after Russia reclaimed Crimea pushed me out of that space. I felt I had to save my skin, he said. It tired me to feel that I was participating in the tragic process leading to the loss of freedom of an entire people. ”

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Freedom. It is also to this theme that Vitaly Mansky devoted his most recent film, Gorbachev. Heaven (Gorbachev. Paradise), an intimate portrait of the former head of the Soviet Union, now in his nineties and ill.

Sans complaisance, il lui a permis de laisser un dernier témoignage sur sa vie et son rôle central dans la chute de l’empire soviétique. « [Mikhaïl] Gorbachev is the only leader [russe] who believed that the interest of the person was more important than the interest of the state. At least, who articulated this idea, ”notes the filmmaker.

Thirty years later, the vast majority of Russians cannot forgive Gorbachev for causing the dislocation of the Russian superpower. Vitaly Mansky is convinced that history will have the last word. “I am 1000% certain that his legacy will be restored in Russia. The country will continue to change. There will be progress. Even if it must take 100 years. ”