Documentary: a filmmaker confronts conspirators with the reality of war in Ukraine

Petra, Ivo and Nikola: For these three Czechs, Russian strikes in Ukraine are an invention and Vladimir Putin is a hero. To open their eyes to them, a director took them to the places ravaged by the conflict.

“As a filmmaker, I have no other weapon than cinema, and I wanted to oppose war in one way or another,” Robin Kvapil told AFP a few days before the release of his documentary “The great patriotic journey”.

Before filming, he went to Ukraine twice to prepare for the film. “It is an experience for life, which never leaves you. Seeing these places change you, simply, ”said this bearded man to 43-year-old glasses on the occasion of a preview in Prague.

The protagonists, whose age or the surname was revealed, were chosen from 60 candidates who applied for his announcement. Their common point: doubting the reality of war.

Was this trip going to transform them? This was not the purpose of such an initiative, assures the director, anxious above all to “capture their confrontation with reality”, camera in the fist.

Over the course of this “interior tolerance exercise”, Robin Kvapil, known to an initiated audience and award winner for his previous documentaries, says he wanted to “transmit the energy of (his) own astonishment”.

Stupor when, destabilized by the atmosphere of the common pits of Izioum, the city of the East taken by the Russian army at the end of March 2022 and recovered by the forces of kyiv in September of the same year, Petra decrees that it is a deception of the Ukrainian authorities.

“I know why this place is so strange!” Because everything is false! ”, We see her exclaim in the middle of the pines of the peaceful cemetery, calling it” exceptional propaganda material aimed at feeding hatred towards Russia “. Despite the horrors seen from her eyes, she keeps the same line and assures her, this film project did not “re -educate” her.

Ditto for Ivo, “fan” assumed conspiratorial accounts which he swallows assiduously on the internet “even if they are not true”, he breathes. He said “not having changed his mind” after this two -week trip which also led the trio to Kharkiv, with schoolchildren forced to study underground to avoid the Russian bombs.

As for Nikola, he is convinced that Vladimir Putin is “the only man in the world capable of stopping Western ideological madness”.

According to a survey carried out last year by the Ipsos Institute, a third of the Czechs declare that they have succumbed to disinformation at least once in their lives. A phenomenon confirmed by a recent report of Czech secret services (bis), pointing to the spread in 2024 of false information from “Russia and domestic actors”.

In this infox ocean, Robin Kvapil, without being “naive” on the potential of cinema to transform society, wants to believe that its documentary “can bring positive things”.

It will be broadcast in Czech rooms on August 21, the anniversary of the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 by the troops of the Warsaw Pact led by the Soviet Union. In a parallel between the repression of the Prague spring movement and the war currently waged by the Kremlin in Ukraine.