The New Russian Documentary: Reclaiming Reality in the Age of Authoritarianism

Over the last three decades, Russian filmmakers and audiences have engaged with documentary cinema with an intensity unseen since the 1920s, when Soviet documentarians helped pioneer the mode. What started as a trickle of artistically minded films in the 1990s, expanded in the 2000s to include a broad range of works, chief among them films seeking to re-evaluate the country’s past and take stock of its present. This efflorescence went hand in hand with the creation of new institutions—film ...