Russia has seen the rise, over the past decade, of a renewed genre, that of military-patriotic films about the Second World War.
“This war is not against Ukraine but against the West, and above all against the United States and NATO. This is how it is perceived in our society.” Director Karen Shakhnazarov, 69, managing director of Mosfilm, receives in the vast meeting room adorned with trophies collected by these legendary studios, created in 1924, and from which many masterpieces of Soviet cinema have come out. Among the awards, two Oscars for best foreign film for War and peace de Sergueï Bondartchouk (1968) et Dersou Ouzala by Akira Kurosawa (1975), a Russian-Japanese production. However, “the patriotic genre in cinema does not exist”says this filmmaker known in Russia, for example for his films The Race Boy (1986) or The Zero City (1988), a subtle charge against bureaucracy in the waning USSR. “A film can be patriotic even if it does not show war, but simply because it is imbued with love for the culture, the history, of its country and…
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