By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com
Short Take: 211: Anna (views)
211: Anna, a documentary by Italian directors Paolo Serbandini and Giovanna Massimetti, has an interesting subject but unfortunately fails to shed much new light on the life and death of its subject, murdered Russian political journalist Anna Politkovskaya. I first became familiar with Politkovskaya through Eric Bergkraut‘s 2005 documentary Coca: The Dove from Chechnya, which focused primarily on Chechen human rights activist Zainap Gashaeva and also featured Politkovskaya’s journalist work on the Russia-Chechnya conflict. And although Politkovskaya was not the primary subject of Coca, that doc actually revealed more about the work she did than this one, which is completely about her.
The Russian side of the Russian-Chechen conflict is that the Chechen’s are terrorist rebels they’re just trying to control (a perception that’s not been dissuaded by events such as the Beslan school massacre, when Chechen terrorists demanding an end to the Second Chechan War took a school full of children hostage, with the end result being over 300 dead — 187 of them children — when Russian troops stormed the school with tanks, rockets and other heavy weaponry). The Chechen side, on the other hand, is that the Russians have engaged in mass genocide in Chechnya that’s been little publicized by media primarily sympathetic to one side of the conflict.
Politkovskaya sought to bring to light the Chechen side of the ongoing struggle, and 211:Anna tries to show us what drove her to push against the political current in spite of death threats and even an attempt to poison her, through interviews with her family, colleagues and friends. In 2006, Politkovskaya was gunned down in the lobby of her apartment building. Her murderer has never been found, though there’s been much speculation that she was targeted for assassination because of her outspoken writing on the Russian-Chechen conflict. Politkovskaya was the 211th Russian journalist killed in Russia since 1991, a startling fact that makes me appreciate that in the work we do as film journalists, the greatest danger we face is sitting through a bad indie film or being accosted by overly enthusiastic film producers and publicists.
However, while the subject matter is interesting, 211: Anna does little to shed light on either the Chechen viewpoint Politkovskaya sought to draw attention to or her motivations for putting her life on the line to be a voice for Chechnya. Her journalistic activism jeopardized her life (and, ultimately, was likely the cause of her death), and I would have liked to have learned more than I already knew about why she felt so strongly about her journalistic advocacy that she would literally risk everything to write what she saw as the truth.
The filmmakers spend too much time on talking to her husband, who doesn’t offer much to illuminate who she was a person; there’s too much time spend on showing us old snapshots of Anna as a child and on her wedding day, and on interviews with childhood friends. The interviews with her friends and work colleagues, in particular her editor, with whom she had a contentious work relationship and close friendship, are somewhat more insightful about what drove Politkovskaya in her journalistic endeavors. We do learn that she was stubborn, and brilliant, and wouldn’t back down when she believed strongly in something, but that could be said of many journalists who work under adverse conditions to report the truth, and is not in and of itself particularly interesting.
The filmmakers sidetrack into exploring the political climate in the Soviet Union/Russia around the time of peristroika, Mikhail Gorbachev’s program of reforms that ultimately led to the restructuring of the Soviet Union and more freedoms, including freedom of the press, and they get somewhat into issues around how, in spite of the increased freedoms on the surface, fear and oppression were still dominating factors. As they try to interview people on the street, most of those they try to interview refuse to even talk on camera about Politkovskaya or anything pertaining to criticizing the government.
And all that’s interesting, and certainly relevant to the political climate in Russa post-glasnost, but this film is about Politkovskaya and the journalism that led to her death, and the film lacks focus in showing either what drove that aspect of Politkovskaya’s life, or making a clearer statement regarding the 210 Russian journalists who died before her.
Does Russia truly have freedom of the press, if journalists are being killed for reporting what some want kept secret? This would have been an interesting story to explore, but the filmmakers only skim the surface of this greater issue. What this film needs one set of the ideas or the other, and it just paints its picture in too broad of strokes to be as compelling as it otherwise might have been.
