Russia: "No ideology anymore. It's just mafia"

Sergei Loznitsa

In today's NY Times: Russia and Ukraine Have Long Been This Filmmaker’s Subject.

....In “Donbass” you take a different approach: dramatizing events based on actual cellphone videos. Why this form?

First, because I was mesmerized by those amateur videos that I found on the internet. Second, I wanted to create this grotesque form because I needed something to keep the film together, and I didn’t want to use just one protagonist or a group of protagonists. 

I wanted you to observe the idiocy in all its shapes and forms. This wonderful film by Luis Buñuel, “The Phantom of Liberty,” also employs this method.

One of the scenes shows Russians moving artillery around from place to place after firing on a civilian bus.

Yes, the most important thing for them was not to be identified. So this is why they had to move from one place to the other. And the killing that occurs afterward [in the film] is because they wanted to get rid of the witnesses.

That sounds like a mafia movie.

Yes, in fact, these criminal gangs that took power in 1917 and that hold power today, there’s no difference between them and any other mafia. Before this, the mafia covered itself up with Soviet ideology. 

Nowadays there is no ideology anymore. It’s just mafia.

“Donbass” also portrays people who are hired to pretend to be witnesses to a staged explosion.

Yes, it happens all the time. This is the technique that’s routinely employed by Russian television, and monitoring groups managed to identify actors who play the parts of witnesses in different locations. So they have almost a cast of actors that they employ for fabrication of fake news. 

There was a notorious TV report around 2014: a story of how Ukrainians crucify a Russian boy. This report was analyzed by professionals who proved that every single element was fake, all staged.

When you were growing up in the Soviet Union, was there a point where you became disillusioned?

The fact is that the entire Soviet Union lived in this kind of double reality or multiple realities, and everybody was aware of it, but very few people actually questioned it. But I was a very bad pupil. [Laughs] 

I was a very good pupil in terms of school results, but I always questioned this double reality and asked myself, “Where am I and what is going on?”

Today this criminal group [in power in Russia] has regrouped. They fixed the country’s economy a little bit. They upgraded their military force. And now they’re ready to conquer the world again. [Laughs]....