“Documentary Filmmaking Is an Absolute Delight”: An Interview with Vitaly Mansky

What is documentary cinema for you—its goals, objectives, motivations? Why are you doing what you are doing?

This is an exhaustive question that could be our entire conversation. Documentary cinema is the author’s interpretation of reality. About twenty years ago, I wrote the Manifesto of Real Cinema. It wasn’t intended as such a revolutionary manifesto. I just wanted to record some changes in the documentary space, which coincided with the transition to digital. And some of my colleagues took it very literally, saying that I claim to directly transfer reality into the space of an audiovisual work. Of course not. Any editing is already a violation of reality. I joke quite often that if the founders of cinema had turned the camera 180 degrees, the first film in history would not have been the arrival of the train, but the people meeting that train. In other words, everything, absolutely everything, depends on the perspective of the person filming, including the interpretation of that very reality.

Now to the question of why, why me, and so on. Specifically, I never dreamed, thought, or planned to make documentary films. Moreover, having been born in the Soviet Union, and more or less understanding the doom of life behind the Iron Curtain, I was looking for forms of existence that would allow me to reconcile myself with this order, so to speak. I lived in Lviv, which was a popular location for the Soviet film industry. People constantly came there to film [scenes set in] London, Paris and Munich. I was very impressed by Georgi Yungvald-Khilkevich when he came to Lviv to film D’Artagnan and Three Musketeers [D’Artanyan i tri mushketyora, 1978] during my school years. And it seemed to me that if I was unlucky enough to be born here, then musicals, Sochi, the corps de ballet would provide some kind of escape from this Soviet existence.

When I was already studying at VGIK, just before the start of perestroika, a friend and I made the film titled A Portrait from Memory [Portret po pamyati, 1984]. It was based on the real story of a woman who decided to flee the Soviet Union, was caught trying to cross the border with Finland, and ultimately hanged herself. It was about the impossibility of reconciliation between an individual and the society imposed on them, about escaping totalitarianism through suicide. The institute banned the film; we were forbidden from showing it even to our fellow students in the film workshop. And then Gorbachev comes, and suddenly everything is taken off the shelves, both films that had been there for twenty years and films that had not had time to gather dust. And I saw our film, which we shot in 35 mm, on the big screen. I remember the screening vividly. It was at the Novorossiysk cinema theater on the Garden Ring, a hall with seven hundred seats, and [there were] no less than fifteen hundred people in attendance. This atmosphere, this energy—it was like a string that was about to snap. It impressed me so much that I felt that this was what I wanted to do.

And after that, there was a turning point. After that, I only made documentaries.

Documentary filmmaking is an absolute delight. That sounds selfish enough, I understand. But it’s a pleasure. Because, unlike journalism with its very shallow connections, documentary film is a deep exploration into different societies, different destinies, different circumstances, and different spaces of history. You really get to live more lives than you were given.

Since then, you have made more than thirty documentaries, not including your work for television. They are strikingly diverse in their themes, subjects, and style. You filmed remote Russian villages, pop stars, heads of state, your own family, North Korea, the gas pipeline between Russia and Europe. You made found-footage compilations, such as Private Chronicles. Monologue; pure observational documentaries, like Pipeline; films where you engage in dialogue with your subjects, such as Gorbachev. Heaven [2020] and Close Relations. How do you choose the form for a film?

I am generally a very conservative person, and my wife tells me I am boring because if I like something, I stick with it, whether it is a certain dish or a specific type of pants. But when it comes to the cinema, I would be terribly bored repeating the same thing. If I have found something, if I have reached a conclusion, and I understand the mechanism, I will move on.

Let’s turn to particular films. I really love your Private Chronicles. Monologue, a film that has always interested me in terms of form. How did you come up with the idea of putting together home videos and overlaying them with a dramatic fictional narrative? There is a constant debate among film scholars and critics about whether or not we can consider it a documentary film. What is it to you?

It seems to me that documentary cinema is less dependent on format than fiction film. Documentary has a wider range of tools and essentially no restrictions. That’s why there is animated documentary, dramatic documentary, reenactment. I am not a hostage to the film that I envisioned. I’m ready to move through the film and sometimes end up with a completely different picture.

Monologue is my favorite film, despite the fact that I didn’t shoot a single frame in it. I was thinking about making a film about Soviet wars using newsreel footage excluded from official reports. Maybe due to technology, maybe to the limits on film stock, but I noticed that the footage was a very formal visualization of the events recorded. There were no shots of people’s eyes, there were no feelings. Around the same time, a friend of mine found a reel of film in a landfill and thought it might be of use to me. I remember very well the evening when I watched the found film, which turned out to be a home video of a family. I saw an image that practically threw me against the wall because of its energy: a young woman in a robe, holding it so it does not fall open, some children around, and she is looking into the camera, but it is quite obvious that she is not just looking into the camera, but into the eyes of a loved one. And I was struck by this look and the feelings so much that I realized there was cinema in this material.

I wanted to find out what happened to these people, where they were now, so I asked [the producer] Konstantin Ernst to show this footage on Channel One. Many people from completely different parts of the country thought they recognized themselves and called in. I decided to make a film. I had no idea what it would be like; I simply began to collect home movies about the Soviet way of living.

I quickly became completely lost in the material, forgetting what reels were from where, because in this footage, in addition to its similar general technical characteristics—film stock, grain, and so on—there was also a typical way of life. The apartments, kitchens, cars, clothes—all were standardized, whether the footage was from Tashkent or Vladivostok, Moscow or St. Petersburg. I realized that this was the story, which was the story of my life too. Igor Yarkevich, who wrote the script with me, did not watch the home videos; I watched them and told him what we had. And then with his text, I returned to editing. And this is how the story was built, which was 60 percent based on my biography, 20 percent on his, and the remaining 20 percent inspired by people in the home videos.

Your filmmaking career has coincided with a period of dramatic political transformation in Russia. Your recent films Under the Sun, Close Relations, Putin’s Witnesses, and Gorbachev. Heaven form a sort of tetralogy investigating the ideology of totalitarianism. What prompted you to take this political turn?

I am very selfish in choosing topics and do what interests me, following the themes that worry me. After age fifty, when the milestones that used to guide you start to fade into the background, what’s the main thing? Life. You understand that life is the only thing you have, and that there is nothing more valuable than freedom. And so I began to explore the question of freedom, unfreedom, the reasons why people agree to unfreedom.⁴ In Cuba, I made a film called Motherland or Death [Rodina ili smert’, 2011], about people who were adults at the time of the Cuban revolution and thus had experienced life in Cuba prior to Communist rule. Then I made a film about North Korea. These films turned out to be political, but that is a result of current society and the agendas imposed upon them. For me, they are less about politics than about exploring a worldview. This is true even of the films about Putin and Gorbachev. I made a film about Putin’s witnesses because they interest me—their acceptance, their silence, their unwillingness to resist.

As a member of a younger generation, I was particularly struck by one scene in the beginning of Putin’s Witnesses. You film your family on New Year’s Eve 2000 watching the televised address when Boris Yeltsin announced his resignation and the appointment of Vladimir Putin as acting president. We hear your wife’s voice off-screen, sounding very upset and angry about the decision. It’s as if, at this very moment, she can see the future of the country for the next twenty years. Before watching this scene, I had thought that this moment of political awakening happened in 2008 with the so-called presidential swap, when Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev became president and Putin became his prime minister.

People with a lot of experience in life and a different vantage point instantly realized what was happening. This is the trick of documentary cinema, and I am not only referring to the scene with my wife, but in general to the mechanism of documentary. With the passage of time, shots begin to work in a different manner, sometimes revealing a completely different meaning. For example, let’s take this famous footage from political trials during Stalin’s purges when the public screams at the enemies of the state during the court proceedings: “Let’s strangle the scum! Death to the enemies of the people!” These obviously staged scenes are valuable precisely because of this staginess. Or take just an ordinary newsreel of a Communist Party congress in the Kremlin. Look at it! The shots speak to the decay of the system much more accurately, comprehensively, and convincingly than the attempts of the most outstanding documentary masters to hint at it through the Aesopian language of their poetic documentary films.⁵

I agree, but for this effect we need a visually sophisticated spectator.

Yes, and it is up to society to educate people. It is no coincidence that Putin’s paradigm, so to speak, is to dumb down the country. It is quite obvious that when a society is demoralized, reduced to the level of basic instincts, such a society is easy to control. Therefore, the Kremlin allowed a few dissident intellectuals to leave the country, so as not to trouble the water in the swamp, as Putin actually said himself.

You once said that you don’t like to include yourself in your films, but one way or another you are a presence in many of your documentaries: Putin’s Witnesses begins with the home video of your family; Close Relations shows you in dialogue with your family; and even in Gorbachev. Heaven, which seems to me a very personal film, you are in conversation with Mikhail Sergeevich. What made you change your mind?

When I was younger, I was disdainful toward directors who participated in their films. They were all of the older generation. Maybe it is true that as you age you begin to think, Whatever, who cares! When I watch a film, I do not like it when the director enters the shot. It is clear that cinema is already a manipulation, but the presence of the director is violence.

When I was making the film Our Motherland, where I traced the life stories of each of my classmates from secondary school, I was obliged to talk about myself. By the way, this was one of my most shameful moments, because I dissected everyone except myself; I came out in a white tuxedo, like in that joke. This was my first entry into the shot in my films. But then the war started and my priorities changed. In Close Relations, when my aunt explains why she supports Russia and Putin, at that moment it became important for me to show my position since this is a film about my family.

I won’t be present in the film I’m currently making. My cinematography reflects my belief that the filmmaker should interfere as little as possible. You can watch all my films: you won’t see any zoom-ins; I very rarely use panning. I prefer to present the space with a wide shot so that the viewer can edit it independently within the frame.

You are not only a prominent documentary filmmaker, but also the founder of ArtDocFest, which started as the largest documentary film festival for Russian-language films. How did you come up with the idea of organizing the festival?

In 2000, my colleagues and I established the LAVR National Award for directors working in documentary film and television. In the third or fourth year of the award, we thought, why not share these films with the public? We organized screenings for five or six days at the Teatr.doc, an independent theater collective located in a basement in central Moscow. I noticed that when we showed television and science documentary films, the hall was half empty, but when we showed documentary debuts and independent documentary projects, it was a full house. There was demand! Typically, festivals are organized on a somewhat different principle, in offices or by investors. And here I saw that a festival already existed, here and now. We decided to combine these entries for debut and art-house documentaries and make a program. The screening venue we found was quite far from the subway, but even in the cold and snow of Moscow in December, people were coming and buying tickets. That’s how ArtDocFest was born. At first, we showed only documentaries in Russian. Now we say that this is a festival of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Our program includes films in Ukrainian, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and so on.

Our vision for the festival hasn’t changed, but the country has. What was possible in 2006 became illegal in 2022. So we moved the festival to Latvia, which has its own challenges. The world now has a very powerful tendency to turn away from Russia, not just the geographical entity, but the Russian-speaking world. And in Latvia, although people respect me, their support for the festival is not unconditional. There are new circumstances where you have to argue, prove, defend, and make some kind of compromises without sacrificing your own position.

As the founder of ArtDocFest, you have had the opportunity to observe and shape the documentary landscape in Russia. What were the most important developments in Russian documentary cinema during the past twenty years?

Russian cinema matured aesthetically and thematically. It has also become more relevant. It developed trends that were shaped by individual names as well, like Alexander Rastorguev.⁶ And it grew, it grew very actively, which makes the pain of the failure we are witnessing now even stronger. Because now Russian documentary cinema, at least the one represented by filmmakers located in Russia, is in absolute decline.

I also wanted to ask about your latest film, Eastern Front, which you codirected with Ukrainian filmmaker Yevhen Titarenko. What was that experience like?

I had never codirected a film before. I had participated in the projects of others, but in other capacities—as a writer, producer, or something else. This collaboration happened out of practical necessity. Yevhen Titarenko, whom I already knew, was in Ukraine filming the war. The footage they collected, often recorded with cameras mounted on their helmets, like a dashboard camera, was very powerful. Yevhen showed it to me, asking for advice on how to work with this material. I began to give recommendations, but it quickly became clear that many of them were unrealistic, since Yevhen himself was a participant, and was inside the situation. War is not the place where you can somehow turn to other topics, to focus on opening up your protagonists. We began to realize that we needed to invent something in order to turn these recording robots into real people, with feelings and beating hearts. It became clear that they needed help from an outside person because their team had been together since 2014, had talked about everything, and knew each other very well. We gathered the protagonists and filmed our conversations with them. I could have taken this material and started working on the film, but I wanted Yevhen to be by my side. Despite the rather complicated process of getting men out of Ukraine, we were able to solve this problem, and Yevhen joined me in Riga.⁷ He is my true and 100 percent coauthor, who participated in everything including editing, sound mixing, and color correction.

How do you see Russian documentary cinema developing in the future, with some filmmakers having left the country following the invasion of Ukraine and some remaining?

We shouldn’t combine them into one. It seems to me that Russian culture is divided between emigrant culture, which today is the only free Russian cultural expression in cinema, literature, music, and painting; and domestic culture, which is censored not only aesthetically, but also ideologically. And, in my opinion, the latter will deepen into a crisis until a new generation appears that is capable of speaking in Aesopian language, capable of working on the verge of understatement. Through this Stalinist cinema, they will have to come to their own thaw, their Khutsievs, their Shpalikovs, their Shepitkos.⁸ But if everything is in such a frozen state, only after fifteen years will it begin to manifest itself.

What are you working on at the moment?

I’m making a film about Ukraine, in my native Lviv, about life in peacetime. And I’m making another film all over the world about how military vehicles, which are present in our everyday life through exhibitions, parades, and so on, change our lives.