“We used to say health to the people. Now we say health to the rich only.”

On Monday 3 February 2014, the Frontline Club screened the UK premier of Putin’s Olympic Dream. Director Hans Pool shone light onto the crooked nature of Putin’s very own “fake smile.” Behind the facade of the Sochi Olympics is a world where the elderly are uprooted to make way for ice rinks and where 50–70% of migrant workers are deported without pay after months of exploitation.

Director Hans Pool. Photo credit: George Symonds

Pool began the Q&A by describing the film – initially conceived as part of The Sochi Project – as his most difficult project to date. He talked of run-ins with the FSB and interviewees who would refuse further participation after being threatened.

In response to a question about managing the risk to people who spoke on film, Pool said:

“When we were filming, they only told us stories they really wanted to tell us. There was no pressure from us to tell really bad stories.”

However, he was only able to find one human rights defender in Sochi willing to speak to the filmmakers:

“It was very difficult. . . . They are very scared to talk about those things. He was the only one.”

Asked by audience members about navigation of visa restrictions and the more opaque elements of the Russian authorities, Pool described the situation as, “always a kind of cat and mouse”.

A crew member in attendance told a tale of sabotage:

“There were a few cars chasing us all the time. I’m Russian actually, so I was kind of embarrassed because of that, so I went up to them and said, ‘What are you doing? You’re embarrassing me and all the Russians, and we know you’re following us.’ They just acted like nothing was going on.

 

“We were actually laughing about it all the time,” she continued, “and going to this one restaurant every evening. But when we got back we figured out that actually every night we were sitting in the restaurant they were entering our hotel rooms. They managed to destroy all the [memory] discs we were using to film. We just figured it out when we got back to Moscow and when we sent the discs back to the Netherlands they couldn’t open them. When the Sony company, in the end, opened them they saw they were scratched. . . . Well we flew back and filmed everything again in one day, . . . but that was really frightening.”

Project participant Valery Molozov

When asked whether members of the International Olympic Committee had seen the film, Pool said he did not know, however: “For me it’s a big question why they organise those Olympic games in countries like Russia or in Beijing. I really don’t understand. It has to do with a lot of money. You know there’s a lot of corruption.”

“What do you think about boycotting the games?” posed another member of the audience.

“Boycotting the games, I don’t know,” responded Pool. “You have to protest. If you’re going there as a supporter or as a politician you have to discuss these things. I think that’s very, very important. . . . I think it’s very important not to shut your mouth, but to discuss it and to get it in the open. It’s terrible for those workers, because they’re paying for the Olympic games, actually. . . . It’s really a shame out there.”

Putin’s Olympic Dream will be screened at the Lexi Cinema in London on 13 February. It will also be screened in Bratislava, Slovakia, on 10 February through the Frontline Club’s International Partners project.

Building of Olympic Stadium, Sochi

In 2007, what would become the most expensive Olympic Games in history was announced. Sochi, on the banks of the Black Sea and known as the Florida of Russia – complete with palm trees and sandy beaches – would host the 2014 Winter Olympic Games.

The story caught the attention of filmmaker and writer Arnold van Bruggen and photographer Rob Hornstra and over the last four years they have produced The Atlas of War and Tourism in the Caucausus, as well as an extensive document online – The Sochi Project – which is published in Dutch, English and Russian. In a discussion with BBC Radio Current Affairs presenter Lucy Ash at the Frontline Club on Friday 1 November, van Bruggen and Hornstra spoke about why they were attracted to documenting the area of Sochi.

“It was flabbergasting,” van Bruggen said:

“. . . a modern winter games on a subtropical sea coast right next to Abkhazia, this desolate ruined country. Right right on the other side of the mountains you have all these other republics where there’s an insurgency going on . . . it’s a region full of contrast.

 

“Everything had to be built from scratch, so they built a new airport, they built a new freight harbour, new roads, new tunnels, all the stadiums, the media village, the sports village, the hotels – everything had to be built from scratch. . . . In the end there has been built a new city next to old Sochi.

 

“The most expensive road in the world – $8 billion. Russian Esquire made this brilliant graphic that you can also make the road in 13cm of Hennessy Cognac or 10cm of Louis Vuitton bags, or black caviar.”

But what do the people living in Sochi think about the huge investment? Van Bruggen:

“They were surprised as well and proud of course, but . . . in 2009 already people were bothered by huge traffic jams, huge construction and huge amount of noise and dust. . . . One side was quite positive, ‘This is our chance – there will be billions of dollars invested in our town.’ The other side is, ‘Will we be destroyed by too much success?’”

Sanatorium pic from Rob Hornstra and Arnold Van Bruggen's presention of @TheSochiProject at @frontlineclub pic.twitter.com/Ej6fbBKqWl

— sophie gerrard (@sophiegerrard_) November 1, 2013

Over the mountains the story is very different as the games have had no effect, except for an increase in violence and retaliation against North Caucasus-based separatist groups.

Hornstra:

“The Russians try to put a lot of pressure on these insurgents and on this whole situation . . . but there was probably [an] unexpected counter reaction which only increased the violence.”

Police check points, raids, arrests, imprisonments and evidence of torture on captives have led to a rise in retaliation against the forces, Hornstra said:

“At a certain point you understand why people are so angry over there, why they are so desperate, why they probably so desperate that they think like ‘I don’t care about anything anymore’.”

https://twitter.com/St_ph_n__/status/396359833156616192

With the Olympics taking place just a day’s drive away, Ash asked: Was there any hope that they could help tourism, trade and increase jobs in the North Caucasus too?

“No.” Van Bruggen said categorically. “I never heard that Sochi Olympics are an opportunity for the North Caucasus.” Similarly, Abkhazia will not profit from the Games so close to its borders, because:

“They didn’t promote themselves. They didn’t try to get any further diplomatic recognition for anything connected to these games, somehow to profile themselves as ‘We’re the country bordering the Olympic Games.’ . . . And of course maybe they already knew that during the games their country will be completely cut off from Sochi because the border will be closed [for security reasons].”

Despite the physical obstacles between Sochi in Russia and the country of Abkhazia, The Sochi Project treats both areas as part of the same region, something that many Russians don’t. Van Bruggen said:

“Some people in Sochi said ‘How can you insert the North Caucuses in the Sochi Project? We’re like the southern suburb of Moscow and they’re a wild rural, strange, violent region, which is completely not connected to us.’ But of course there’s only one mountain between these two regions and we see it as one. . . . In Russia that’s not a normal thing to do. . . . That’s one of the main discussion points around the project.”

Watch the full discussion below.

Photographer Rob Hornstra and writer/filmmaker Arnold van Bruggen have been working together since 2009 to tell the story of Sochi, Russia, the site of the 2014 Winter Olympic Games. Together their images and text reveals a telling portrait of this complex region.

In a talk chaired by BBC Radio Current Affairs presenter Lucy Ash, Rob Hornstra and Arnold van Bruggen will present images from The Sochi Project and speak about the wider Caucasus region and its contrast with the glamour of the Olympic Games. They will also be discussing their approach to self-publishing.

Both based in the Netherlands, they have returned repeatedly to this region as committed practitioners of “slow journalism”. Over four years, they have established a solid foundation of research on, and engagement with, this small yet incredibly complicated corner of the world, documenting changes as it finds itself in the glare of international media.

The Sochi Project is a dynamic mix of documentary photography, film and reportage about a world in flux; a world full of different realities within a small but extraordinary geographic area.

All images © Rob Hornstra, courtesy Flatland Gallery NL|Paris.