On Wednesday 24 February, a panel of experts met to discuss the legacy of war and communism in eastern Europe. A full house convened for the event to mark the release of the latest edition of Granta, No Man’s Land, which focuses on the ground between opposing forces, twenty five years since the fall of communism. 

Themes of amnesia, nostalgia, construction, rebuilding, liberal democracy, end of history, paranoia, and conspiracy theories led the body of the rich discussion.

Oliver Bullough, journalist and author of The Last Man in Russia and Let Our Fame Be Great who has lived and worked extensively in Russia, chaired the event. Joining him were senior fellow at the Legatum institute and author of Nothing is True and Nothing is Possible, Adventures in Modern Russia, Peter Pomerantsev, and Philip Ó Ceallaigh, author of Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse and The Pleasant Light of Day.

The event began with Pomerantsev and Ó Ceallaigh reading excerpts from their Granta pieces – ‘Propagandalands’ and ‘Bucharest, Broken City’ –  and drawing the audience into the landscape that was to be discussed.

Bullough engaged with the theme of truth being an irrelevant concept in eastern Europe. “This idea that the victory belongs to the persuasive… How pervasive is that? How quickly do you doubt everything?”

“Ukraine is a laboratory of contemporary propaganda… The problem that people have is they have too many sources of information… In all the sociology they say ‘we don’t believe anyone anymore,'” Pomerantsev responded. He went on to say that this phenomenon is not unique to Ukraine but is seen across the world – particularly in the United States.

Ó Ceallaigh commented later on the mistrust that was prevalent in Romania during the time of communism. “One of the deepest wounds of the Communist years was the fact that everyone was snitching on everyone else.” He shared that the younger generation are different in that sense.

Bullough then moved the discussion onto the subject of nostalgia, questioning its significance in the contexts of Ukraine and Romania.

“I think nostalgia might be more about not being happy with the present… The phrase that the separatists used, ‘things will be like they always were’; they’re talking about some kind of dreamscape. On the one hand the internet breaks our idea of reality, fragments it, and in this fragmented space people start dreaming of sort of lost nostalgias… But at the same time when you go and pull down a statue of Lenin no-one seems to care,” Pomerantsev responded. 

“It’s a nostalgia for a fictional past,” added Ó Ceallaigh.

Fascinating @GrantaMag/@frontlineclub talk last night with @OliverBullough & @peterpomeranzev. Now to dive into this pic.twitter.com/Uc5RKAtrT9

— Jack Losh (@jacklosh) February 25, 2016

The discussion moved to the notion of conspiracy theories, with Bullough asking: “Is conspiracy theory essentially yearning for a higher power?”

Pomerantsev commented, “Confronted with the chaos of globalisation, the chaos of too many information sources for our little minds to cope with… people revert to conspiracy theories. And that is a reflection of some of the nasty political movements.”  

“Victims of the violence are actually being confused with the perpetrators, which is exactly what you had in the wake of the Paris attacks… The media suddenly flips and you see things completely backwards. It happens over and over again. This is what we need to recognise,” Ó Ceallaigh said.

An audience member asked the panel to comment on how the West could feasibly improve the current situation in Ukraine and Romania.

Ó Ceallaigh responded, “Throw money at it. In a way it’s as simple as that. It’s crude and usually goes wrong at the beginning, because when you throw money at a corrupt society the people there who are going to take advantage are those in power.”

Cuba was the first communist state to be created in the western hemisphere – it’s also the last one standing. But the United States’ economic embargo against Cuba, coupled with the break up of the Soviet Union, has left this island nation struggling to provide for its citizens’ most basic needs.

In 2011, President Raul Castro introduced a series of dramatic reforms designed to stimulate growth. For the first time in decades, Cuban citizens were allowed to sell their homes and open businesses. Foreign companies are now permitted to invest in Cuba too.

The President insists that these measures are designed to preserve, rather than dismantle, Cuban socialism. But can he successfully open up the economy without betraying the promise of a classless society upon which the Cuban state was built? Juliana Ruhfus and Seamus Mirodan investigate.

People and Power is Al Jazeera’s weekly investigative documentary programme that looks at the use and abuse of power. People and Power: Cuba for Sale will be broadcast on Al Jazeera English on 24 February.

Reporters: Juliana Ruhfus and Seamus Mirodan
Runtime: 25′

The panel:

Richard Gott (moderator) is a British journalist and historian with forty years experience of Latin America. He was for many years on the staff of The Guardian newspaper in London. He is currently an honorary research fellow at the Institute for the Study of the Americas at the University of London. He is author of Cuba: A New History (Yale University Press), and Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution (Verso).

Stephen Wilkinson first visited Cuba in 1986 and has been travelling to and writing about the island ever since. Now assistant director at the International Institute for the Study of Cuba, Stephen has a PhD on the subject of Cuban literature. He has written numerous articles on such questions as the history of US-Cuba relations, Cuban attitudes and policy towards homosexuals and the nature of the Cuban state. Stephen’s book: Detective Fiction in Cuban Society and Culture was published in 2006 by Peter Lang. He frequently comments on Cuba issues on The Guardian newspaper’s Comment is Free website.

Juliana Ruhfus is the senior reporter for Al Jazeera’s ‘People & Power’ investigative and current affairs strand where she has worked since 2006, when her film on Liberian ex-combatants launched the channel’s programming content. Nearly 30 films later she has gone undercover in Turkmenistan and in Cambodian orphanages, produced the five part ‘Corporations on Trial’ series, and her two-part investigation into the trafficking of Nigerian women into the Italian sex-trade is one of the most-watched People & Power shows in its history. In 2010, she was awarded the Ochberg Fellowship, and in 2011 she received a scholarship for Harvard’s Global Trauma Program. She is currently on the European board of directors for the Dart Centre for Journalism and Trauma.

Since 1995, Helen Yaffe has spent time living and researching in Cuba. Her PhD thesis, undertaken at the London School of Economics, was published as Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution by Palgrave Macmillan in 2009, and subsequently in four other language editions. Her research and publications have continued to focus on Cuban political economy, as well as the political economy of Latin American regional economic integration. Helen has taught Cuban and Latin American (economic) history at UCL, LSE and Birkbeck. She is currently a Fellow in the Economic History department at the London School of Economics (LSE) where she lectures and teaches on the history of economics.

Bernard Regan, Cuba Solidarity Campaign National Secretary. CSC campaigns against the illegal 50 year old blockade of Cuba, for an end to the US occupation of Cuban land at Guantanamo Bay, and to defend the Cuban people’s right to be free from foreign intervention. The Cuba Solidarity Campaign is broad based and has more than 5,000 members, affiliated organisations and local groups. Together we lobby MPs and government, organise solidarity brigades specialist tours and exchanges, and work to build links and better understanding between Britain and Cuba.

Both writers encounter people who are longing for a strong leader to bring back security and pride. They will be joining us to discuss whether, following the challenges to democratic structures in Russia, Hungary, and most recently Poland, eastern Europe’s new democracies are at risk.

Chaired by author and journalist Oliver Bullough, who lived and worked in Russia from 1999 – 2006. He is author of two books about Russian history and politics: The Last Man in Russia and Let Our Fame Be Great.

With:

Peter Pomerantsev, the author of Nothing is True and Nothing is Possible, Adventures in Modern Russia. He is a senior fellow at the Legatum Institute, where he runs a project on contemporary propaganda and how to deal with it.

Philip Ó Ceallaigh is the author of two collections of short stories, Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse and The Pleasant Light of Day. At present he is working on a book about the Jewish world of Eastern Europe and its destruction, as witnessed by its writers.

This event is organised by

The Frontline Club and Theatre Royal Plymouth in association with Sputnik Theatre present four nights of new Russian drama. Featuring exciting and topical plays by British theatre directors and cast – translated into English by Sputnik’s artistic director Noah Birksted-Breen. Each evening will touch upon various aspects of life in Russia covering an array of issues, from the clampdown on theatre and freedom of speech to growing social tensions and immigration.

Grandchildren. The Second Act by Alexandra Polivanova and Mikhail Kaluzhsky

Running time: 55 mins

How do the grandchildren of prominent Stalinists feel when they find out who their beloved grandparents really were? Interviewed by the playwrights over the last couple of years, the protagonists’ grandparents were from Stalin’s inner circle – or members of the Soviet Communist Party or NKVD – and their testimonies bear witness to the very human desire to forgive those we love, even when we know their worst crimes.

Chaired by Gabriel Gatehouse, BBC foreign correspondent who has extensively covered the Ukrainian – Russian crisis. In June 2015, he conducted an exclusive interview with former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich in Moscow for Newsnight.

The panel:

Alexandrina Markvo is an art advisor and entrepreneur, and a leading figure in the arts sector in Moscow. She was forced to flee to the UK in April 2014 following persecution by the Russian government – her application for political asylum is currently under consideration by the UK authorities.

Vladimir Ashurkov is executive director at the Anti-Corruption Foundation, a non-profit established in 2011 by prominent Russian opposition politician, Alexey Navalny. On 1 December 2015, the Anti-Corruption Foundation released a film titled Seagull, accusing the general prosecutor Yuri Chaika’s sons of large-scale corruption and connections to organised crime. The film has made waves in both public and political circles and has garnered over 3.5 million views on YouTube to date.

Prior to pursuing civil and political activities, Ashurkov had a career in finance and served as a director at one of Russia’s largest investment groups, Alfa Group Consortium. He was granted political asylum in the UK in April 2015.

Oliver Bullough is a prize-winning writer, broadcaster and journalist, who has written in, around and about the former Soviet world for the last decade and a half. His book The Last Man in Russia: And the Struggle to Save a Dying Nation is about the effect of Stalinism on future generations. Bullough is currently investigating fraud, money-laundering and international corruption.

John Freedman is an American writer, translator, critic, and scholar of Russian drama and theatre. He has been a theatre critic for The Moscow Times since 1992.

Joshua Oppenheimer

 
It is estimated that over 500,000 people were slaughtered in Indonesia between October 1965 and the early months of 1966.

Paramilitary militias and vigilante groups, coordinated by the Indonesian army and aided by British and American intelligence agencies, were responsible for mass killings in the country’s anti-communist purge. Nearly 50 years later and the perpetrators still hold power and are heralded as national heroes.

In his groundbreaking 2012 film, The Act of Killing, Joshua Oppenheimer exposed the impunity with which the perpetrators live. On 18 September The Fontline Club screened Oppenheimer’s follow up piece, The Look of Silence.

After the screening Oppenheimer joined the Frontline Club over Skype.

The Look of Silence follows Adi, an optometrist whose brother was murdered during the anti-communist purges. Throughout the film Adi meets and directly confronts those responsible for his brother’s death.

Although he does not feature in The Act of Killing, Oppenheimer told the Frontline Club that Adi was an important collaborator in both films. “Over the years making The Act of Killing, Adi would watch everything we had time to show him,” said Oppenheimer.

It was this involvement that lead Adi to ask Oppenheimer to help him meet his brother’s killers. “I sat down with [Adi] and he said, ‘you know Josh, I’ve spent seven years watching your footage of the perpetrators, and it’s changed me and I need to meet the man who killed my brother… I need to confront them and see if they can take responsibility for what they’ve done.’”

Joshua Oppenheimer

Making the film with Adi could have been extremely dangerous. “There has never before been a film where survivors confront perpetrators who still hold a monopoly on power,” said Oppenheimer who initially refused to make the film this way.

However after their experience working on The Act of Killing, Ali believed that confronting his brother’s killers would help reconciliation. “He though they would welcome this as this chance to sort of be forgiven by their victims families… and to stop this manic boasting which he always felt was defensive,” said Oppenheimer.

“I didn’t realise that he might be right until after I started to film Anwar Congo,” Oppenheimer said referring to the main protagonist in The Act of Killing. None the less he was still sceptical that Adi would receive the apology he was hoping for. In the five years that he filmed with him, Oppenheimer told the Frontline Club that never once did Anwar Congo consciously admit to himself that he was wrong to have killed.

Instead, with The Look of Silence, Oppenheimer hoped that the meetings between Ali and his brother’s killers would allow him to capture the unconscious guilt

“Maybe if I can film with precision and empathy and intimacy,” said Oppenheimer, “the complex human reactions that are inevitable when you go into someone’s home and say ‘look you’ve killed my brother, please can’t you take responsibility for this for the sake of our children’… then we can make visible the previously invisible abyss of fear and guilt that’s dividing everybody in this society.”

Oppenheimer told the Fontline Club that the primary audience was always intended to be Indonesians. There was an outpouring from human rights groups and survivors that Oppenheimer needed to keep filming with the killers in order to expose the lie that the 1965 killings were heroic.

“[I] felt as though I was entrusted by the survivors and the human rights community to do a work that clearly they could not safely do themselves… and I felt therefore much more like their agent than I ever felt like a foreign filmmaker,” said Oppenheimer.

The release of The Act of Killing has started a transformation around the way that Indonesia talks about its past. “Whereas the mainstream media was once, with very few exceptions, or before with very few exceptions silent about the genocide or celebrating the heroic extermination of the Indonesian left, now they talk about the genocide as a genocide,” said Oppenheimer.

Because of the changes that The Act of Killing have made to the national discourse, Oppenheimer told the Frontline Club that The Look of Silence released in a much bigger way than would have been possible if it was a standalone film. “Adi came to both [premier] screenings as a surprise guest and received a 15 minute standing ovation,” he said.

The two films have prompted the introduction of a truth and reconciliation bill into parliament. “It’s woefully inadequate,” said Oppenheimer, “… but it’s a great step because it sort of enshrines the acknowledgement that what happened was wrong.”

As well as catalysing change within Indonesia, Oppenheimer is also hoping to pressure both the UK and US governments to openly admit to their role in the killings.

“That’s, I think, terribly important if we’re going to actually stand up against impunity at home in the west, and if our talk about human rights, our rhetoric about human rights is not to be merely hypocritical.”

Joshua Oppenheimer

In this multi-award winning companion piece to The Act of Killing, filmed before its release, Joshua Oppenheimer further explores the terrible legacy of the Indonesian genocide fifty years ago, this time through the lens of one family.

Adi was born in 1968, two years after his brother Ramli was slaughtered in front of many eyewitnesses. Now an optometrist, Adi lives with his elderly parents and his children. Not only does he live under the ongoing rule of his brother’s killers, but he must listen to his children regurgitate the propaganda that instigated the killing, and is still being perpetuated in schools.

Adi decides to confront some of the perpetrators of the genocide, who are surprised when his questions are more probing than Oppenheimer‘s. His breaking of the silence leads to some electrifying scenes, in a film where the beauty of the Indonesian landscape belies the bone-chilling horrors carried out there in the name of democracy.

Radically different to Oppenheimer’s previous film, The Look of Silence is equally shocking and keenly observed. Filmed in his characteristic visual style, the film bears witness to the collapse of fifty years of silence.

“One of the greatest and most powerful documentaries ever made. A profound comment on the human condition.” – Errol Morris

“Profound, visionary, stunning.” – Werner Herzog

Director: Joshua Oppenheimer
Producer: Signe Byrge Sørensen
Year: 2014
Runtime: 103′
Distributor: Dogwoof UK
www.thelookofsilence.co.uk

The creative documentary 1989 is a high-politics drama about the the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Iron Curtain. When the young technocrat, Miklós Neméth, was appointed Hungary’s new prime minister, his main task was to save the country’s appalling economy. Neméth decided to remove the expensive border control apparatus from the state budget, a decision which set him up against communist hardliners, and soon after the Berlin Wall fell.

Director Anders Østergaard recreates the events of 1989 and invites the audience into the secret meeting rooms through a mixture of testimonials, archive material, recreation and reconstructed dialogues of the key political players.

Directed by Anders Østergaard
Duration: 96′
Year: 2014

This event is organised by the Czech Centre London.

Twenty five years ago in December 1989, Václav Havel was elected as President of Czechoslovakia, marking the end of the Velvet Revolution and with it, the culmination of 41 years of communist rule.

Before becoming a statesman, Havel was a playwright, essayist, dissident and philosopher. His political activities during the communist regime brought him under the surveillance of the secret police and led to multiple prison stints, including a four-year incarceration between 1979 and 1983. His Civic Forum Party played a major role in the Velvet Revolution, and Havel himself was instrumental in dismantling the Warsaw Pact and expanding NATO eastwards. Above all, however, he remained an intellectual and an artist.

By his side throughout was Michael Žantovský, Havel’s press secretary, speech-writer, translator and close friend. The pair met as dissidents under communist rule and remained close until Havel’s death in 2011. Žantovský will be joining us in conversation with Edward Lucas, senior editor at The Economist, to bear witness to Havel’s extraordinary life as documented in his new book Havel: A Life, and to share his own experiences of living through the Velvet Revolution and the formation of the Czech Republic.

Michael Žantovský is the current Czech Ambassador to the Court of St James. He was among the founding members of the movement that coordinated the overthrow of the communist regime. In January 1990, he became the spokesman, press secretary and advisor to his lifelong friend, President Václav Havel. He has combined a career in politics and the foreign service with work as an author and translator into Czech of many contemporary British and American writers.

Part of the Made in Prague Festival, 17 October – 30 November 2014.

On Monday 27 January a large audience gathered at the Frontline Club for a screening of Mark Cousins’ contemplative essay-film Here Be Dragons, followed by a Q&A with the director, via Skype, and with producer Don Boyd, founder of HiBROW.

Producer Don Boyd

Here be Dragons assumes the form of an intimate travelogue, tracking the director’s week-long stay in Albania as a jury member of Tirana’s 13th international film festival. Cousins explores Albania’s current cinematic culture, notably the plight of the national film archives, which sit in a state of disrepair, whilst reflecting on wider questions of trauma, history and memory in the context of post-communist Albania. Here Be Dragons interweaves shots of Tirana, namely the Pyramid of Enver Hoxha and other architectural remnants of the former totalitarian regime, with old film clips – emphasising Cousins’ sentiment that “to look is to travel”.

An audience member opened the post-screening discussion by noting the sense of “sadness” and “greyness” that, in his opinion, pervaded the film, and asked Cousins whether this was representative of present-day Albania.

Cousins responded that his aim was to document the “emotional landscape” of the nation and to capture the “balance between happy and sadness which you find in many places”.

“If you spend time in Albania, you do find that it is a kind of post-traumatic world. . . . It has had so many dreams thrust upon it, and so many of those dreams ended up to be empty dreams. And so people aren’t sure what to believe.”

He concluded that while the overall melody of Here Be Dragons was one of sadness, “there is a hopeful tune there, especially amongst the young people”. Cousins later pointed out that compared to all the Albanian films produced in the last five years, which he had watched in his capacity as a jury member of the Tirana International Film Festival, Here Be Dragons remained less bleak.

Boyd then paid tribute to the “phenomenal knowledge of the cinema” in which Cousins’ rooted his work, adding that the director balanced his filmic enthusiasm with “his considerable intellect . . . which is so rare in modern cinema”.

Director Mark Cousins joins the Q&A via Skype

Another member of the audience, who had travelled to Albania on numerous occasions, asked whether dealing with a little-known subject matter involved a greater responsibility on the part of the filmmaker, as film plays a crucial role in the shaping of a nation’s identity. Cousins echoed this sentiment with his statement that “film legacy is a kind of autobiography of a nation”. The audience member also enquired as to the reaction that the film provoked in Albania, in particular from viewers outside of the creative community.

Cousins responded that Here Be Dragons had inspired an extremely positive reaction from Albanian viewers, with one critic naming it “the best film ever made by a foreigner about Albania”. Boyd confirmed the film’s positive reception, and stated that he found the Albanian people to be “sensationally not bleak . . . and really positive about what they call their ‘experiment’ to do with the future, and they felt that Mark’s film was a metaphor for what had gone before”.

A member of the audience asked Cousins to comment on the level of engagement of young Albanians with their national history, and their relationship to Albania’s past and future. Cousins responded:

“Most people [in Albania], young and old, realise that they have a toxic history. But one of the reasons why I think that I felt strongly that I wanted to make this film, was that I realised that every country has a toxic history. . . . England, Ireland and Scotland all have toxic histories. Right down the road from me there are big, fancy houses built from the slave trade . . . so I think there is a sense of solidarity in common humanity.”

Cousins concluded from his ‘study of looking’ that, with regard to the future, young Albanians had “a degree of optimism, but a massive amount of caution, and that’s what I tried to capture in the film”.

Cousins closed the discussion with an impassioned response to an audience member’s suggestion that the film expressed a certain sympathy for Hoxha’s communist dictatorship:

“I absolutely believe in equality, I absolutely believe that . . . the idea of serfdom . . . is one of the biggest crimes in history. Anything that tried to redress that, started out good. However, I ended up furious with Hoxha before I went there. . . . He poisoned this principle which is so important for emancipation and equality around the world.”

To find out more about the current plight of the Albanian Film Archive, and the work of activists to restore it, visit the site of the Albanian Cinema Project.
To watch the trailer for Here Be Dragons, and to keep up to date on upcoming filmic collaborations between Mark Cousins and Don Boyd, visit the website of HiBROW, and click here to follow the film on Facebook.