Last Letters From My Grandma
IDENTITY: From Moldova to the southern Urals to Spain, Last Letters from My Grandma links family loss to larger political fractures, asking what peace costs and who pays.
Soviet Union
«There’s something wrong, and I want to understand what it is»
INTERVIEW: Vitaly Mansky talks with Modern Times Review on his Manifesto for Real Cinema.
The Helsinki Effect: Does diplomacy matter?
INTERVIEW: Modern Times met the Finnish director Arthur Franck behind The Helsinki Effect at CPH:DOX in Copenhagen. We discussed the legitimacy of treaties, militarisation, and filmmaking.
We Live Here
NUCLEAR: The first Kazakh documentary to screen at CPH:DOX zeroes in on a family affected by a Soviet-era nuclear test site.
The devil in the details
CONFLICT: Uncover the truth behind Conflict, an engaging but flawed analysis of warfare from 1945 to Ukraine.
Visions of a waning west
CONFLICT: Emmanuel Todd predicts the West’s decline, analysing the Russo-Ukrainian war and its implications in his thought-provoking book.
Victory Day
RUSSIA: Victory Day in Russia in 2022 – barely six weeks after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine – plays out the same tired old themes of the Red Army’s victory over Nazism in 1945, with those celebrating eagerly taking up the new propaganda of victory.
Changing the world through documentary
MEDIA: Cultural anthropologist Sherry B. Ortner provides an easy-read introduction to the logic and visions behind Brave New Films, whose documentary production is non-profit and distributed through social and political networks with the articulated goal of mobilising resistance against capitalism, racism, and fascism.
A mother’s life and passion: Anna Politkovskaya
RUSSIA: Anna Politkovskaya’s daughter: “My greatest wish is to experience Russia as a thriving, free and developed country, not desolate, poor and militarised.”
Opening the files on lives under surveillance
SURVEILLANCE: A gripping exploration of Soviet-era paranoia and oppression in Ukraine.
Exploring cinematic reflections of crisis: documentary on the march
CINEMA: More prescient than ever, Doclisboa’s «Documentary on the March» retrospective provide a blueprint for today’s documentaries for social change.