by Gregg Goldstein
Amidst all the chaos and destruction since Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, one important part of the picture is often overlooked: some 900,000 exiles who left Russia to avoid prison or being drafted into a war that’s created hundreds of thousands of casualties. A handful of their stories are explored in Patric Chiha’s documentary “A Russian Winter” (“Un Hiver Russe”), which has its world premiere Feb. 17 in the Berlin Film Festival‘s Panorama section.
The feature plays out in the style of Richard Linklater’s fictional “Before” trilogy, following a pair of artist friends, Margarita and Yuri, as they wander around Paris discussing their situation and the existential questions it inspires.
“The day I watched the news in September 2022, there were images of young men crossing the Georgian border, fleeing on foot, by bicycle, by car,” the French writer-director Chiha recalls. “While they were experiencing a situation unimaginable to me, their faces seemed to speak in a very profound way about our world, its fragility, its violence and its cause.”
Most chronicles of the war have focused on Ukraine’s destruction and the death of civilians and soldiers on both sides of the fight. But this film’s more personal focus serves to examine a much larger subject.
“Since the start of the war in Ukraine in 2014, or maybe the invasion in 2022, we have had the feeling that the semblance of peace in which we lead our Western lives could slip away from us at any moment,” Chiha says. “Some may wonder why I didn’t shoot in Ukraine, where people are obviously suffering more, and more violently. I have friends there, and I went to Kviv for a festival in April 2024, where I had the chance to meet Ukrainian film directors. I understood that it’s up to them to tell their story.” So instead, Chiha sought to get the perspective of Russians who could offer specific insights into how they feel about the war, why they are against their homeland’s regime and what daily life under its oppressive government is like.
Katia Khazak, who produced the feature with fellow Aurora Films exec Charlotte Vincent, has worked with Chiha on narrative and doc projects for some 20 years. She helped enlist Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains as its co-producer, and obtained additional funding from the French nation cinema body CNC, Région Île-de-France and Image/Mouvement du Centre National des Arts Plastiques.
Brussels-based Best Friend Forever, which is handling international sales on “Winter,” has already secured two distributors — Léopard Films in France and Filmgarten in Austria — both of which will give the feature a theatrical release.
“The idea [with “Winter”] is to speak about what a lot of countries are going through right now where extreme regimes are rising,” Khazak says. “The key was to make it as universal as possible.” This was partly accomplished by shooting in nondescript parts of Paris, which also helped preserve the anonymity of the film’s subjects. But visual effects that “paint” the buildings in different colors, mirroring a party that the main protagonists attend with fellow artists, help to keep the film visually interesting.
Chiha feels that “Winter” will also have a special resonance for people in the U.S. today. “In France, we demonstrate a lot. But in the last three years, I’ve had such a big feeling that this doesn’t change anything anymore,” he says. “What can we do? What is this feeling of powerlessness? So I think this is a film about all of us.”