“The less you know, the better you sleep,” says a smirking former KGB officer in The Kyiv Files, Walter Stokman’s uneven but elegantly assembled documentary about the cruel, paranoid surveillance regime imposed on Ukraine by Moscow during Soviet times. Working from Cold War archives only declassified in 2017, the Dutch director revisits three case studies of people whose lives were affected, and sometimes blighted forever, by heavy-handed secret police attention.
Stokman is mostly digging into events that happened many decades ago, but he uses Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine as a background framing device that links two authoritarian regimes, past and present. World premiering in IDFA this week, The Kyiv Files is scheduled for Dutch domestic release in February. The evergreen appeal of vintage espionage thrillers, lent an extra timely boost by current geopolitical events, should give it a decent shot at further festival bookings plus wider audience exposure.
Shot with an eye-pleasing retro aesthetic, The Kyiv Files opens with cameras gliding through the corridors of an old people’s care home in contemporary war-torn Ukraine, all set to wistful ambient music. The residents burst into nostalgic song, trade bittersweet memories, or fret nervously about family members caught up in the current war. Any connection with the film’s core archive material is tenuous here, apart from reminding viewers how Ukraine clearly remains a post-Soviet country still deeply scarred by decades of brutal Russian occupation.
Stokman then cross-cuts between the three historical KGB stories using contemporary interviews, archive footage and vintage still photos, all glued together by more abstract, impressionistic shots. Maximising the local angle, he begins with the strange tale of two young Dutchmen, Evert Reydon and Louw de Jager, who were arrested and jailed as western spies in Kyiv in 1961. This is the least satisfying of the trilogy, as The Kyiv Files never manages to clarify the truth behind these murky claims. Acting like an undercover agent himself, Stokman stakes out the dilapidated caravan where the reclusive de Jager has apparently chosen to spend his twilight years, but never even scores a glimpse of him. In a final melancholy coda, de Jager dies in 2022, taking his secrets with him.
Fortunately, The Kyiv Files has more engaging cases to explore. One is Lisovaya Vira Pavlovna, a teacher who was exiled to Siberia in the 1970s, along with her family, for spreading dissident “nationalist” and “anti-Soviet” views. Still an unrepentant bad-ass today, Pavlovna scathingly recalls the toxic cocktail of bullying, blackmail and bribery that KGB agents deployed to pressure vulnerable citizens into becoming informers and collaborators. “The regime was based on total control and fear,” she says, still burning with hatred half a century later.
The strongest of the three chapters features Regine Chivrac, a bohemian French woman of Ukrainian heritage, who visited Kyiv in the 1960s. There she was lured into a casual sexual relationship by Bogdan Nikolayevich, a married student working for the Soviets, whose tortuous logic wrongly earmarked her as a foreign spy. Adding an extra twist of casual misogyny, the nickname assigned to her by the KGB was “Courtesan”.
Stokman tracks down the gloriously spritely 80-ish Chivrac today in her Brittany home, allowing her to view her declassified KGB file for the first time, including clandestine photos taken of the couple in bed that resemble stills lifted from a chic French New Wave movie. “Is that me?” Chivrac wonders incredulously. “Yes I recognise my breasts… I look pretty cool.”
The dissonance between Chivrac’s romantic memories of this brief affair and Bogdan’s coldly descriptive written account of methodical betrayal is very telling, full of petty deceptions and shifty ambiguities that echo the power dynamic in more conventional relationships. She seems more bemused than offended by his treachery: “There was nothing wrong with his erection, that was real enough,” she laughs. But she also tells Stokman: “If you see Bogdan, tell him he’s a bastard.”
Alas, the film-makers fail to secure a proper interview with Chivrac’s former lover. The best they can deliver is a scratchy telephone call in which Bogdan sounds vague, evasive and befuddled. In common with the rest of The Kyiv Files, there is a sense of a fascinating mystery only partially resolved here, not least because these events happened so long ago, but perhaps also because access to first-hand Ukrainian and Russian sources has inevitably been drastically limited by the war. The end result is a patchwork film that offers more questions than answers, intriguing and entertaining on its own terms, but still missing a few key pieces of the jigsaw.
Director: Walter Stokman
Cinematography: Jackó van’t Hof
Editing: Bobbie Roelofs, Mieneke Kramer
Sound: Alex Tugushin
Producers: Frank van den Engel, Elize Kerseboom
Production company: Zeppers Film & TV (NL)
Venue: IDFA (Frontlight)
In Dutch, Ukrainian, French, Russian
78 minutes
