Roaming through trenches under bombs, Nikolai Ryabinin, a successful Moscow writer, searches for his soldier brother who disappeared in Donbass in the summer of 2015. In the occupied territories, peaceful Russian soldiers live in harmony with Russian-speaking Ukrainians, but are harassed by the Ukrainian army, bloody and merciless. The hero has no other choice than to take up arms in turn, insists the trailer forIndicator: Passenger, which is released in all cinemas in Russia this March 15.
The film will add to the wave of war stories which have been flooding cinemas for six months. The plots focus more and more on the “special military operation”. Among them, The witness, filmed in the Donbass, follows a Belgian musician on tour in Ukraine, who becomes a prisoner of war and witnesses, behind bars, the crimes of the “ukronazis”, presented as an army of rapists killing old people on the roads. After escaping, he testifies on an American television set to “bring the truth to light”.
Audience flop
Guaranteed to be 100% consistent with the Kremlin’s ideology, featuring valiant Russian soldiers facing the perverted West, these productions are commissioned and financed by the State. They are supposed to revive the patriotic momentum in the run-up to the presidential election (March 15 to 17), according to confidential reports of the Russian presidential administration leaked by Estonian journalists. A “special cultural operation” orchestrated with hundreds of millions of rubles.
Only problem, the recipe doesn’t work. The witness was a memorable flop last year (only 50,000 admissions). And other war blockbusters generally struggle to reach 500,000 spectators, “because they are poorly made, the scripts shoddy”, judges film critic Anton Dolin, in exile in Latvia.
More subtle propaganda
Other propaganda fictions, much less violent, on the other hand, met with great success; they glorify “traditional Russian values” and the greatness of Russia. The comedy Depending on the mood of the pike (8.5 million spectators in 2023) features a popular tale: a fish from Lake Baikal with magical powers ends up saving, with his human sidekick, the kingdom of a Russian tsar threatened by the English. The very popular series Slova Patsana evokes, for its part, the precariousness and the gang wars in Kazan in the 1980s. A way of raising awareness of the clear increase in the standard of living since the end of the Soviet Union…
One director, however, is an exception. The Russian-American Mikhail Lokshin, opposed to the war, brilliantly adapted the novel by Mikhail Bulgakov The Master and Marguerite. The authorization for its broadcast, since January, remains a mystery, as the film contradicts the official line. Unlike the war stories, it was a hit: more than 5 million spectators discovered these adventures of a young censored writer in Moscow in the 1930s. A rare hymn to freedom in the midst of all these odes to violence.
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