More than three years after Russia began a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the two films, premiered in the Venetian-era sidebar at the Venice Film Festival, explore another conflict that involved the Kremlin decades ago, and in the process draws out cold similarities with the events unfolding today.
“Memory,” a poetic, deeply personal hybrid documentary of filmmaker Vladrena Sandhu, who opens the strands of the Venice era, is an effort to deal with the trauma that was inflicted on the director when he was a young girl during the war in the Chechnya Republic in the Russian Republic.
Meanwhile, Nastia Korkia’s “Short Summer” is a gentle coming-of-age story that takes place 10 years later, about when it became known as the second Chechen War. In it, the 8-year-old begins to spend summer vacation with her grandparents as her marriage begins to fall apart, facing the troublesome complexities of the world around her.
Although their approaches are fundamentally different, the two films highlight how the same mechanisms of violence and oppression that promoted Russia through Chechnya conflict are today reproduced. Just as the Kremlin tried to quell opposition to its vicious campaign in the Resting Republic, it therefore has the deafening silence that comes with Ukraine’s stupidity.
The Russians are taught that the most important thing is not to stand up, not to protest, because if that’s the case, the machines of the state will destroy you,” says Kolkia. “We think that’s what’s actually happening with all political activists (in Russia).
The battle in the “short summer” takes place off camera and is far from the forefront of the war, reflecting the director’s own childhood in Russia. Revisiting that period 20 years later, Corkia recognized her fellow-born brothers, as they were back then, today, as they were now, “ambitious blindness.”
“For most Russians, this war – we never called “war” – it was a faraway place. And people preferred to leave from it,” the director tells Variety. “We lived a normal life while this fear took place.”
Nevertheless, as “short summer” shows, “the reaction of war is permeating civilian life,” says Corkia. “We see that in society we are inevitably facing consequences. If we turn our backs from war, it won’t go away. In fact, it will thrive in this (environment).”
Sandhu formed more personal interests in the Chechnya conflict. Born in Crimea, Ukraine, she moved to Grozny as a child in the late 1980s, when Russian invasions and air bombing campaigns destroyed the Chechnya capital, claiming the lives of up to 100,000 civilians and expelling more than half a million people.
Nastia Corquia’s “Short Summer” premieres during her Venice days.
Courtesy of Totem Films
“Memory” takes into account both the violence and its aftermath, and serves not only as Sandhu’s attempt to deal with her personal trauma, but also as a documentary record of the atrocities committed in the Chechnya, which the Kremlin and many Russians refuse to admit.
The calm effect of that silence remains. When the director, who left Grosney with his family in 1998, returned to make “memories” 20 years later, she was forced to hide the essence of her work. Sandhu has submitted fake scripts to Russian and Chechnya culture ministries to secure filming permission, and instead appears to be making “patriotic films” about his grandfather, a hero of the Soviet war.
Even after receiving Go-Ard for filming, she and her crew secretly filmed to avoid the police. Most of her team never received the full script, fearing it could put them in danger.
The climate of filmmakers trying to question Russia’s war efforts remains hostile. Growing up in Moscow, Kolkia left Russia in 2021 and joined the Docnomads MFA program. However, after a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, she says, “I hadn’t seen the future in my country, and there was no chance of working on the film there.” She is currently based between Germany and France.
Meanwhile, Sandhu was arrested in Pushkin Square in Moscow in February 2022 and held a picket sign calling for peace. When authorities discovered she was Ukrainian, she realized she would become a simple target if wider crackdown occurred. Two weeks later, she decided to leave the country.
Sandhu currently lives in Amsterdam and sees from afar as “both my hometowns – both Crimea and the Chechnya Republic are under occupation.” But it only burned her resolve to tell the story of the Chechen War when she lived it.
“I have no choice to be silent,” she says. “I’m one of the witnesses who knows the truth about how it was.”
