TIFF Shuts Down ‘Russians At War’

In the two and a half years since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began in February of 2022, the accompanying information war about this conflict has changed multiple times. Nowhere has this shifting of the rhetorical focus been quite so blatant as the recent decision by the Toronto International Film Festival to shut down all remaining screenings of the documentary Russians at War by director Anastasia Trofimova in response to threats by Pro-Ukrainian protesters. With the Canadian broadcaster TVO abandoning director Anastasia Trofimova and TIFF having to pull the film due to credible threats of political violence, the situation has taken a turn for the grotesque. It’s hard to tell who’s engaging in censorship and who’s just scared- which is exactly what the kind of environment the more unsavory elements of our political discourse are hoping for.

What is the political content of Russians at War? While in Russia on New Year’s Eve, Trofimova meets a soldier dressed as Santa Claus, learning to her great surprise that he’s a Ukrainian fighting in the Russian army. They promise to keep in touch, and between scenes Trofimova probably couldn’t film, she’s able to embed herself in a medical unit. Trofimova claims to have snuck into the unit, as relevant Russian commanders kept changing their mind about whether to let her embed.

Though ethnically Russian, Trofimova is, by any reasonable definition of the word, Canadian in terms of her background. The dozen or so documentaries she made prior to Russians at War mostly deal with conflicts in the Middle East. TVO, among others, funded Russians at War because it’s basically the same kind of film she’s made before for television, purporting to show on the ground conditions in a war zone.

Given how controversial Russians at War apparently is now, it begs the question as to why TVO would agree to fund such a documentary. But you have to think of the far away context of 2023 when Trofimova was seeking support for the project. Back then, in  the English language world, it was still a popular talking point that demoralized Russian troops were sure to turn against Putin. This idea was present from the beginning of the war in 2022 with stories of Russian men fleeing overseas in order to avoid conscription. It seemed fully legitimized by the summer of 2023 when Wagner Group commander Yevgeny Prigozhin made the baffling decision to turn his soldiers around and march toward Moscow.

This was the political background in the West while Trofilmova embedded with the Russian medics and actually filmed Russians at War. But by the time the film was ready to premiere at TIFF, the situation had changed quite a bit. The current day interpretation of the war in Ukraine is that demoralized Ukrainian soldiers are engaging in military operations with no apparent long term path to victory. We rarely hear of Russian men evading conscription  now, but this has become a serious problem in Ukraine as the military draft and those who enforce it have become enormously unpopular.

What makes Russians at War so perverse is that Trofimova is quite obviously trying to show that the Russian military is suffering from similar issues. The soldiers she depicts genuinely believe that they’re fighting Nazis and also believe, quite dejectedly, that they have no choice but to fight until they achieve peace, while wanting peace above all else. If Trofilmova has any overarching thesis or purpose to humanizing these Russian soldiers, it’s to show that their government, which has no sincere interest in ending the fighting, is duping them.

Normally anti-war positions like this aren’t controversial in documentaries like this. They certainly weren’t in regard to any of Trofilmova’s other documentaries. But in the current political moment, simply wanting to end the war in Ukraine isn’t good enough. Ukraine has to win the war, no matter how unlikely that prospect becomes. Take the moment from last week’s debate, where Donald Trump doggedly insisted that millions of people have died in Ukraine for nothing and that he would end the war if elected. The moderators only wanted to know whether Trump would help Ukraine win the war, the implication being that no matter how many Ukrainians die in this war, it will be worth it so long as future historians can write the war up as a Ukrainian “win” on the relevant Wikipedia page.

Given how little Ukrainian lives matter in the war at this point, it’s little surprise that Russian lives matter even less, and this is what makes Russians at War so offensive to certain flavors of Ukrainian nationalists. The documentary implies that Russian soldiers are stupid kids and jaded men pushing retirement age, not evil rampaging monsters, by allowing them to tell their stories. What’s worse, Russians at War refuses to argue with the medics about their reasoning for participating in the war, or including facts in subtitles showing how these Russian soldiers are lying, simply allowing us to interpret their words the same way Trofimova is.

In one sequence, Trofimova has a long chat with a Ukrainian woman who supports the Russian invasion because she claims the Ukrainian government had been shelling her home for years before the Russians showed up. That the Ukrainian government had been shelling Donbass for years before the Russian invasion isn’t in dispute, incidentally. This is probably why Trofimova thought she could include this interview in her documentary without arousing too much anger.

But then this is an issue with documentary filmmaking in general these days. It’s not enough for a documentary to give us an accurate impression of people’s lives. Documentaries need to be making affirmatively correct political arguments. It is, of course, impossible to make an objective documentary if you go into it with that kind of assumption, nor would any of Trofimova’s subject likely have been honest with her about their motivations if she’d betrayed any obvious slant.

What are these compelling pro-Russian propaganda arguments the soldiers make anyway, that it’s so dangerous for TIFF to give Russians at War a platform? Well, they just say there are Nazis in Ukraine, never terribly confident about how they actually know this. They do use a swastika for target practice at one point, though. Presumably an actual Nazi drew that, but who knows? That’s not the point of Russians at War anyway. This documentary isn’t an affirmative justification for the war in Ukraine, it’s a statement about generally sad soldiers desperate for something to believe in, and at other times desperate for an injury bad enough they’ll get to go back home.

When one older man closes the film by saying he still supports the war despite everything, because he’s seen nothing to persuade him another way is possible, the statement isn’t a ringing endorsement of Putin’s Russia. Rather, it’s a condemnation of leaders worldwide being incapable of finding another solution. When a young woman closes the film with her improbable love story, she expresses existential dread for the sad world she’s leaving to her unborn child.

Sentiments like this are only offensive to people who believe there’s such a thing as a just war, which is why until these protests happened, Trofilmova was expecting and worried about reprisals from the Russian government both against her as well as the men and women she interviewed. Perhaps we can take that much as a silver lining of this whole ugly censorship controversy. Now that Russians at War is officially a “Russian propaganda film”, Putin probably won’t see any point in persecuting that one guy who deserted the unit to go home to his family.