Documenting the Russian angle in Trump election Two new films will put any doubts about meddling to rest
Still on the fence about whether Russian interference in the 2016 election led to the victory of U.S. President Donald Trump? Two films at the Hot Docs Festival, coming from different perspectives and with vastly different tones, should put your doubts to rest.
Active Measures takes an investigative approach, quoting impeccable on-therecord experts as well as losing Democratic standard bearer Hillary Clinton and Republican Sen. John McCain, and providing historical context.
The tone of Our New President is a lot less serious — farcical even — as it relies entirely on “found footage” detailing Russian efforts to influence the U.S. campaign through its state-controlled media and other means, while looking at the ridiculously amateurish ways ordinary Russians, via YouTube, have chosen to celebrate Trump’s victory.
Maxim Pozdorovkin, a Russian émigré, said the idea for the film and its ironic title came as a result of a visit home by co-editor Matvey Kulakov.
“About two weeks after the election, (Kulakov) came back from visiting his mother in Moscow and, at this point, the whole Russian story was just a very, very faint whisper … and he goes, ‘Everyone in Moscow is very excited about Trump, they keep on calling him our new president, our new president,’ ” Pozdorovkin recalled.
Active Measures takes its name from a real program by Russian intelligence agencies and the state-controlled media, detailing Russia’s long, success- ful history of bullying its enemies using all the underhanded tools of propaganda and the internet. A massive nationwide cyberattack on neighbouring Estonia, the film notes, took place on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s birthday while Ukraine and Georgia have felt Russia’s wrath in even more sinister ways.
Director Jack Bryan said he and his team began working on the film in April 2017, when evidence of the Russian interference in the presidential election became insurmountable, a view shared even earlier and unanimously among the U.S. intelligence community.
“It really was just about, let’s get down to the facts. For me, I felt that we don’t need to exaggerate … the reality is the most disturbing part of it, so all we have to do is figure it out and then just go to the people who know the most about these things and say, ‘What happened?’ And the answers they gave us back, we couldn’t have made up anything that disturbing,” Bryan said.
For Pozdorovkin, who earned his PhD studying early Soviet propaganda, the film was an in- teresting challenge.
“We all know what fake news is, what propaganda is and that it exists. How do you actually make people feel something about that? And so the film is really kind of relentless in the way it kind of bombards you with this stuff. By the end of the film, everyone is kind of shellshocked, and feels dirty and wants to take a shower. They’re laughing hysterically for the first 45 minutes and then it settles in,” he said.
Bryan said he’s getting a powerful reaction from audiences.
“I’m not used to leaving a screening and someone grabbing me and saying, ‘Everybody needs to see this.’ It feels nice, but it also feels real; it feels like a responsibility,” he said.
Despite the rapturous reception his film is getting at film festivals, Pozdorovkin may have a different dilemma.
“It almost feels like we’ve hit a hornet’s nest where you can make fun of Trump but actually talking about what happened (in the election) in a sort of a satirical way is just too uncomfortable. So distributors love the film, but they’re almost terrified of it; it’s too risky,” he said.