Putin’s Witnesses

Dir. Vitaly Mansky. Latvia/Switzerland/Czech Republic. 2018, 102 mins. DCP. In Russian with English subtitles. It is the year 2000, and filmmaker Vitaly Mansky is hired to make a movie about Russian presidential candidate Vladimir Putin. In the wake of Boris Yeltsin’s surprise resignation, in which he named the recently appointed Prime Minister his successor, a special election is scheduled to happen. And it was Mansky’s job to go behind the scenes and present the real Putin to the world. Eighteen years later, Mansky returns to the footage he shot during this time, reconsiders it, questions his own participation in it, and looks for clues to explain what would happen in the ensuing two decades of Putin’s regime. Along the way, Mansky transforms what had been functional, vaguely propagandistic footage into a font of constant revelation.

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