For found-footage filmmakers, there may well be no darker source of material than the internet and live-streaming apps, where endless hours of amateur videos capture the collective terrors and anxieties of our era, unfiltered. In her profoundly disturbing assemblage of clips shot and publicly shared by youth in Russia, Angie Vinchito follows in the footsteps of web-content mash-up artists such as Dominic Gagnon, who scour the recesses of free-content distribution platforms for reflections of weirdness on the margins of our technology-connected age. Vinchito’s cumulative vision, Manifesto, is of a militarised Russia brainwashed by endemic violence, and an education system in disarray that is geared toward indoctrination and control rather than cultivating minds. The documentary’s chilling bleakness and graphic violence (despite blurred and blacked-out images designed to reduce their explicit shock), as well as its non-conventional, experimental form, will confine it to more niche documentary festivals and platforms. But the argument it advances regarding a Russia in cultural breakdown that has failed a new generation and instituted the brutal abuse of power in civic life has an urgent, albeit un-nuanced, topicality. It strongly echoes the nation’s perceived cultural imperialism on the global stage, amid its ongoing full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Manifesto begins with a disclaimer, in the form of an intertitle that declares that it is not the film’s goal to encourage opposition of any kind, or actions directed at disrupting public order. That the director felt a need for this declaration underscores from the outset the climate of censorship in today’s Russia, and the possible repercussions for dissent. Clips of kids getting up early to head to school, across the seasons, soon give way to much more alarming material. Through groupings of clips (unlabeled until the end credits), the director progresses an argument about the root causes behind a pervasive sense of youth disenfranchisement and dead-end hopelessness, and a normalised gun culture. Sirens cut through the calm of a snowy winter morning, signaling one of many nuclear attack drills and sending pupils running to a school bomb shelter. Footage of physical assaults and the sexual harassment of students by teachers paint surreal scenes of unsafe classrooms. Lessons prepare pupils for patriarchal oppression (a teacher declares that females must be ready to oblige their husbands with sex whenever they want it), military pride (marching to patriotic songs is shown as part of physical education), and a fear-based attitude to geopolitics that regards outsiders as a sinister threat to survival and prosperity, to be held at bay by vigilance and nuclear power.
The selectivity intrinsic to this kind of project leaves it open to accusations of bias in presenting the extreme as usual, and Vinchito’s vision of the nation’s schools can seem relentlessly horrifying. Yet Stalinist echoes in clips that deal with ideological re-education make it hard to deny there is something gravely amiss in Russia’s education system. A student in tears, mascara running down her cheeks, complains that a teacher has threatened to write a report on her political views. Others are angrily warned that in Soviet times their “Putin’s a thief” blackboard scrawl would have resulted in execution.
The film escalates into more controversially graphic territory. Footage of simulated terrorist attacks and evacuation drills, which seem as much geared to creating a mood of everyday fear as they are to teaching real crisis skills, give way to clips of actual killings, in chaotic scenes of real school massacres. The track ‘Death No More’ by Russian electro band Ic3peak, whose YouTube popularity has caused unease in the Kremlin, talks about street protest and a nation set alight; it soundtracks a segment where youths discuss revolution in uploaded posts, as they plan to attend a rally for opposition politician Alexei Navalny. But any hope for political change to be sensed in this segment is quickly dimmed, as coerced public apologies follow. A youth regrets his “unauthorised action” of protest in Murmansk; another denounces his own moral affront to Chechnya’s leader and Putin ally (and notorious persecutor of his country’s own LGBTQ population) Ramzan Kadyrov. A clip of “self-punishment” addressed to Kadyrov is only partially blurred out, and we hear the culmination of an extended sequence, on a blacked-out screen, of a young couple who commit suicide after shooting at police. This is live-streamed over Periscope and is particularly upsetting, raising the thorny question of whether the documentary goes too far in re-circulating viral extremity in networked space in Russia. Nonetheless, the film offers alarming insight into the distress that official propaganda cannot fully suppress.
Director, Producer, Editor and Screenplay: Angie Vinchito
Sales: Angie Vinchito
Venue: IDFA
In Russian
68 minutes
