Russia/Norway/Georgia,
2010, 116 min
Shown in 2010
CREDITS
- dir
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Olga Konskaya, Andrei Nekrasov
- prod
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Torstein Grude, Olga Konskaya
- cam
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Trond Tønde, Varlam Karchkhadze, Davit Asatiani
- editor
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Erik Andersson
- source
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Kudos Family AS, Kvitsoygata 25, 4014 Stavanger, Norway. FAX: 47-5111-6337. EMAIL: oddleiv@kudosfamily.com. WEB: www.russianlessons.org.
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COMMENTS
In GGA competition. Director Andrei Nekrasov in attendance.
OTHER
The 2008 war between Russia and Georgia—and its previous incarnation in 1993—forms the crux of this extraordinary documentary exchange, filmed not after the fact or from the comfort of an unaffected place, but directly from the separate front lines of conflict among soldiers, refugees and victims. As war broke out once again in August 2008, filmmakers Olga Konskaya and Andrei Nekrasov (whose prior documentary, Rebellion: The Litvinenko Case, was banned in Russia) went immediately to the conflict. She filmed from the Northern side, he from the Southern lines, with both sending images to one another along the way (Nekrasov was thus able to show fleeing refugees in the South, images of their bombed villages in the North). Moving far beyond war reportage and a mere gathering of footage, however, the two compare their images with that from the official media, and discover a strain of cover-ups, misrepresentations and outright lies. Expanding into a full history of post–Cold War conflicts through the clashes between Russia, Georgia and the Georgian Republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, Russian Lessons demonstrates with penetrating clarity how the “truths” of history—and contemporary events—are manipulated by those in power, and how events in one corner of the world have repercussions across the globe. A fascinating, highly personal examination of war, holocaust and memory, the film is also a testament to activist filmmaking—those individuals standing against superpowers with only a digital camera and strength of will.
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FACTOID #45
Peter Jennings, Peter Ustinov, Bill Cosby and Gene Kelly have all served as master of ceremonies on Opening Night of the San Francisco International Film Festival.
