Russian director Kirill Sokolov spent the past week stunned by the horror unfolding in Ukraine. Half of his family is Ukrainian, he said in a telephone interview, and as a child he spent summers there staying with his grandparents.
His maternal grandmother was still living in Kyiv, he said, “hiding from bombs in a bunker.”
Since the Russian invasion began, Mr Sokolov has said he has signed two online petitions calling for an end to the war, an act that poses a risk in Russia, where thousands have been arrested for protesting the conflict and some have reportedly lost their jobs. you are.
However, despite his anti-war stance, Mr Sokolov learned on Monday that the Glasgow Film Festival in Scotland had removed his latest film, Without Looking Back.
A festival spokeswoman said in an email that Mr Sokolov’s film – a comedy about a mother and daughter trying to kill each other – has received Russian state funding. The decision to exclude the film does not affect the director himself, she said, but it would be “inappropriate to continue with the screenings normally while the attack on the Ukrainian people continues.”
As the war in Ukraine enters its second week, cultural institutions around the world are battling whether to boycott Russian artists, in debates reminiscent of those around South Africa during the apartheid era, and calls for musicians, writers and artists to avoid Israel in support of the Palestinian people.
Festival organizers and filmmakers are considering protests shortly after Russia’s invasion last week, when the Ukrainian Film Academy launched an online petition calling for a “boycott of Russian cinema.”
The petition, which garnered more than 8,200 signatures on Friday, said screenings of Russian films at festivals created “the illusion of Russia’s participation in the values of the civilized world.” He also urged distributors not to work in Russia. Several Hollywood studios, including Disney, have paused publications there, and a Netflix spokesman said Friday that the streaming service has halted all future projects in Russia, including acquisitions.
Updated
March 4, 2022, 10:54 a.m. ET
Mr Sokolov, the Russian director, said he accepted the decision at the Glasgow festival, although he found it “really strange”. Many Russian directors are critical of Russian society and politics, he said; if festivals outside of Russia stop showing their work, “it’s as if they drown out our voices,” he added.
“Probably 99 percent of Russian films” receive funding from the Russian state, Mr Sokolov said. “It’s very difficult to make a film here without government sponsorship.” This includes many veiled – or even overt – criticisms of Mr Putin’s life.
Several small film festivals have been called upon by the Ukrainian Film Academy, including the Black Nights Film Festival in Estonia and the Vilnius International Film Festival in Lithuania, which excluded five films from its program on Monday. One of them is the award-winning “Division 6” by Finnish director Juho Kuosmanen, which also received Russian funding. Mr Kuosmanen said in a telephone interview that he had accepted a state investment in his film, shot in Russia, to alleviate bureaucratic difficulties. He understood the festival’s decision and said he was “happy if my film could be used in this battle”.
The world’s largest film festivals take a different approach. On Tuesday, the Cannes Film Festival in France said in a statement that it would no longer “accept official Russian delegations or accept the presence of anyone associated with the Russian government.” This would mean that the Russian film agency could no longer have a pavilion at the event to organize parties and receptions. A spokeswoman for Cannes said in an email that this would not mean a ban on Russian directors.
Wednesday was followed by the Venice Film Festival, which said it would not accept “persons bound in any way to the Russian government” at its events. He added that he would welcome “those who oppose the current regime in Russia”.
The war between Russia and Ukraine: key things you need to know
Map 1 of 4
A Ukrainian city is falling. Russian troops gained control of Kherson, the first city to be conquered during the war. Overtaking Kherson is important because it allows the Russians to control much of Ukraine’s southern coast and push west toward the city of Odessa.
Jane Duncan, an academic at the University of Johannesburg who has written about cultural boycotts as agents of political change, said the actions could be “extremely successful” if there are clear rules about who they are targeting. The cultural boycott of South Africa, which activists first called for in 1958, was initially a total ban on foreign artists working in the country and on art institutions abroad hosting South Africans, she said. But later, she added, activists realized that the terms harmed South African artists who were already censored.
The boycott was eased in the late 1980s so that artists could tour abroad and spread the message of the evils of apartheid. But, Duncan said, “the difficulty of a selective cultural boycott is ‘Who decides?’
Although the Ukrainian petition that started the debate was unequivocal, there are still divisions in the Ukrainian film industry over whether Russian films should be banned. Respected Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa, whose film Donbass about Ukraine’s war with Russia in the east of the country was screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 2018, said in an email: “We can’t judge people by their passports.”
“When I hear calls for a ban on Russian films, I think of my Russian friends – worthy and respectable people,” he added. “They are victims of this war, just like us.”
However, for others in the industry, this line is no longer valid. Algirdas Ramaska, director of the Vilnius International Film Festival, said any film involving Russian-based companies would indirectly raise money for the war in Ukraine through taxation. “Complete isolation” will force more Russians to rise up against their government, he added.
Mr Ramaska said he was desperate to continue to support Russian directors, but how to do so in this climate “was a really, really difficult question”.