Just two weeks ago, director Vera Krichevskaya’s documentary about Russia’s last surviving independent national TV news station Dozhd was gearing up for its Moscow cinematic premiere. But those two weeks now feel like an eternity. Following President Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, Russian screenings of F@ck This Job were all cancelled due to bomb threats and the channel itself abruptly shut down, a victim of repressive new laws restricting domestic reporting of the war. Facing credible death threats and possible jail terms, several of the station’s key staff have now fled into exile.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. This quote is often wrongly attributed to George Orwell, whose classic dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty Four laid bare how Stalinist-style dictatorships manipulate reality with government propaganda and fake news. In a further twist of bitter irony, Dozhd itself has now been branded “fake news” and a “foreign agent” by the Kremlin’s media enforcers. On March 3, the channel announced it was temporarily suspending operations, cutting to footage of Swan Lake in protest, a witty reference to Soviet-era protocol when imposing news blackouts. The message is clear: under Putin, the bad old days of Cold War censorship are back with a vengeance.
British-based Russian documentary maker Krichevskaya, who helped launch Dozhd (aka “TV Rain”) in 2010 but left soon afterwards, has been filming the channel’s bumpy progress ever since. F@ck This Job is the result, titled after a line uttered by one of the station’s reporters caught in heavy crossfire during the Ukrainian revolution of 2014. Premiered at IDFA and NYC Docs festivals last year, the film screened on BBC Television in the UK last week under its more family-friendly alternative title Tango With Putin, a very British form of mild censorship in action. Given its timely subject matter, Krichevskaya’s decade-long insider chronicle of Putin’s paranoid police state is sure to gain more attention from broadcasters and programmers in the coming months. Its next festival booking will be in Thessaloniki on March 19.
As an inspirational portrait of resilience and courage in the face of a regime where journalists are routinely murdered or jailed, F@ck This Job is urgently relevant for very grim, serious reasons. But it is also an unexpectedly funny and human story, shot with a playful eye and a rich musical soundtrack. After all, Dozhd was initially founded by a group of tango-dancing, party-loving Moscow socialites to celebrate Russia’s fragile new dawn of liberal freedom, but ended up documenting its slow death instead. Founded by flamboyant “dancing queen” Natalya Sindeyeva and bankrolled by her wealthy banker husband Alexander Vinokurov, the station was staffed by a young, heavily female, LGBT-friendly team. With her fondness for champagne, karaoke, luxury cars and designer clothes, Sindeyeva makes a great larger-than-life heroine in this tragicomic story of naïve personal idealism and thwarted political hopes.
Despite its light and gossipy approach, Dozhd first began attracting vaguely hostile Kremlin attention for its mildly irreverent satirical comedy skits about Putin and his protégé Dmitry Medvedev. But when Medvedev temporarily took over the Russian presidency in 2008, promising a more liberal agenda, the station hailed him as a potential beacon of progress and even invited him to tour their offices. However, this young reformer proved to be a Trojan Horse, paving the way for Putin to retake the throne in 2012 for an ever-extending, all-powerful reign.
Unlike most Kremlin-controlled media channels, Dozhd covered widespread protests against alleged vote-rigging in the 2012 elections. As Russia became more repressive, the station’s reporting grew more critical, from homophobic new laws banning LGBT “propaganda” to shock exposes of palatial mansions apparently owned by Putin and his cronies, raw frontline footage of the Ukrainian revolution in February 2014, and the shooting down of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 by a Russian missile in July the same year, plus some bravely risky reportage of Russian fatalities and prisoners of war in eastern Ukraine.
Prominent Putin critics including Boris Nemtsov, who was shot dead close to the Kremlin in 2015, and Alexei Navalny, who survived a poison attack but remains in jail on trumped-up charges in Russia, both appeared on the channel. Krichevskaya uses a multi-screen mosaic to contrast Dozhd’s independent coverage with state-owned stations, which mostly reported these same events with official government propaganda. Or deafening silence.
After a string of death threats and shadowy warnings, Dozhd finally earned the full wrath of the Russian state with a clumsy talk-show quote about the World War II siege of Leningrad. Mysteriously dropped by most TV platforms and advertisers overnight, Sindeyeva and Vinokurov were forced to move the channel behind an online paywall. Evicted from their main studio, they relocated to a Moscow apartment above an illegal brothel. “Two of the world’s oldest professions,” Krichevskaya notes wryly, “in a building owned by the Ministry of Defence.”
Recently, as Putin consolidated his authoritarian control over almost all of Russian media, Dozhd has been subject to mounting legal harassment. When the station removed their paywall to broadcast violent police crackdowns against 2019 protests over regional election irregularities, their ratings climbed to more than 20 million views. Their offices were soon raided live on air and Sindeyeva called in for police interrogation. In a surreal twist, her face was then plastered on street posters labeling her a “foreign agent” alongside Pussy Riot, Navalny and other dissident voices. The echoes of Soviet-era language are not accidental.
Meanwhile, with her TV channel under existential threat, Sindeyeva has also faced harsh personal challenges including the collapse of her marriage and treatment for breast cancer in Germany. But even in these dark days, as Krichevskaya discovers, this embattled dancing queen continues to take tango lessons and drink champagne. This story is not over yet, even if a post-Putin Russia is still just a distant dream for most of the world. A lively and inspiring portrait of just a few of the countless brave Russians standing up to Putin, F@ck This Job is a revealing snapshot of how tyranny works in a digital age, and a biting indictment of brutal dictators who fear the revolutionary power of truth.
Director: Vera Krichevskaya
Screenwriters: Vera Krichevskaya, Paulina Ukrainets
Cinematography: Danny Salkhov, Aleksandr Shelaputov
Editing: Adam Finch, George Cragg, Vera Krichevskaya
Music: Simon Russell
Producers: Vera Krichevskaya, Mike Lerner
Production companies: Roast Beef Productions (UK), Six Days Films (UK)
World sales: Journeyman Pictures, UK
In Russian, English
104 minutes
