The movie centers around a renowned violinist from Belgium arriving in Kyiv to perform. The date is February 2022, and his trip is upended as Russia starts bombing Ukraine. The musician survives a series of “inhuman crimes and bloody provocations by Ukrainian nationalists,” and he wants to tell the world “what it was really like.”
“The Witness” — a state-sponsored drama that premiered in Russia on Aug. 17 — is the first feature film about the 18-month-old invasion. It depicts Ukrainian troops as violent neo-Nazis who torture and kill their own people. One even wears a T-shirt with Hitler on it; another is shown doing drugs. It also has the main character’s young son wondering: “Isn’t Ukraine Russia?”
It’s the narrative the Kremlin has been promoting since the first days of the war — all packaged up in a motion picture.
The release of “The Witness” comes after Russian authorities announced a plan to boost production of movies glorifying Moscow’s actions in Ukraine and is part of a growing number of propaganda films.
But in an era of instantaneous information and disinformation in wartime and other times, two questions present themselves: Are propaganda films actually effective? And are they any good?
Whether such films will attract viewers is a big question. Similar movies have been box-office disasters. Plus, sociologists say the public interest in following the war has waned, and people these days mainly want to escape from the gloom and doom of news from Ukraine.
“We regularly hear (from respondents) that it’s a huge stress, a huge pain,” says Denis Volkov, director of the Levada Center, Russia’s top independent pollster. Some Russians, he says, insist they “don’t discuss, don’t watch, don’t listen” to the news about Ukraine in an effort to cope with that stress.
Film is an important medium that governments have used to shape patriotic messages — from the early days of the Soviet Union to wartime use by Nazi Germany and Italy, and even by the United States during and immediately after World War II. In more modern times, North Korea founder Kim Il Sung and his son and successor, Kim Jong Il, presided over a regular output of propaganda movies.
State-sponsored propaganda films have also been employed in the Middle East to varying degrees of success. Syria’s civil war, for instance, became a focal point of Ramadan TV soap operas in the past decade, including some that were supportive of Syrian President Bashar Assad. Iran regularly funds films glorifying hard-liners and paramilitary forces it backs across the region.
In today’s Russia, propaganda as fiction isn’t a haphazard effort. Russian authorities speak openly about their intention to bring the Ukraine war — or, rather, the Russian narrative around it — to the big screen.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered the Culture Ministry to ensure theaters screen documentaries about the “special military operation,” as the Kremlin calls its war in Ukraine. The ministry also has prioritized themes when allocating state funding for films. These include “heroism and selflessness of Russian warriors” in Ukraine and “battling modern manifestations of the Nazi and fascist ideology” — a false accusation Putin makes about Kyiv’s leaders. MDT/AP
