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Grozny Blues

A film by Nicola Bellucci written by Nicola Bellucci & Lucia Sgueglia

Switzerland 2015, 104 min, documentary, DCP OV: Russian, Chechen with English, German, and French subtitles

Produced by Frank Matter, soap factory GmbH

Contact:

Loredana-‐Nastassja Fernández, soap factory GmbH, Hafenstrasse 25, Postfach, CH-‐4019 Basel -‐ [email protected] -‐ +41-‐61-‐6320050 -‐ www.soapfactory.ch

www.facebook.com/soapfactoryfilms

«Grozny Blues» by Nicola Bellucci, 2015, produced by soap factory GmbH

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CONTENT I. The Film I.i Synopsis…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….3 I.ii Credits……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….4 I.iii Festivals & Awards………………………………………………………………..…………………...……..7 II. Essays & Historical Background II.i Ordinary Heroines – On Nicola Bellucci’s «Grozny Blues» by Irena Brezna..........8 II.ii The War, Friends, Love by Lucia Sgueglia, Co-‐author..........................................10 II.iii The Age Of Compromise by Lucia Sgueglia, Co-‐author........................................12 II.iv Historical Background..........................................................................................17 II.v The Chechen Archive...........................................................................................20 III. Appendix III.i Press Quotes........................................................................................................21 III.ii Bio-‐/Filmographies Director, Producer, Co-‐author..............................................23 III.iii Contact.................................................................................................................24


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I. THE FILM

I.i Synopsis

«Grozny Blues» follows a handful of people around Grozny, the capital of war-‐torn Chechnya where daily life is defined by political repression, constricting customs, forced Islamification and the failure to come to terms with past and recent history. The film revolves around four women who have been fighting for human rights under worsening conditions for many years but get more and more disillusioned with the situation in Putin’s Russia. The building where they work is also home to a Blues Club that is frequented by a group of young people. Having only vague memories of the Chechen wars in the 1990s, they try to make sense of the strange things that are happening in their country. In linking the personal and intimate to the political, Nicola Bellucci shows in a dramatic and yet very poetic way what it means to live in a divided society that navigates a no-‐man’s land between war and peace, repression and freedom, archaic traditions and modern life.

WITH

Zainap Gashaeva Zarman Makhadzieva Taisa Titiyeva Taita Yunusova Ruslan Lalayev Musa Sadulayev Taisa Kantayeva Timur Tumgoyev Vakhid Turayev & Arubika Gayeva Zaurbek Dataev Malik Goldenberg Kazbek Hatsaev Taisa Kantayeva Amina Rada and many others


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I.ii Credits

written by Lucia Sgueglia & Nicola Bellucci directed by Nicola Bellucci produced by soap factory GmbH, Basel in co-‐production with Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen SRF producer Frank Matter co-‐producer SRF Urs Augstburger production office Loredana-‐Nastassja Fernández Zoë Meyer director of photography Simon Guy Fässler location sound Nicola Bellucci assistant director Lucia Sgueglia editor Anja Bombelli interpreter Lucia Sgueglia Andrei N. Mironov additional camera Olga Kravets Nicola Bellucci Géraldine Zosso additional sound Patrick Becker music Blues Brothers Cafe Band: Ruslan Abdullayev (guitar) Aslan Pakiev (bass guitar) Haron Erayev (guitar) Ramzan Umarov (drums) original music Valerio Vigliar

Bruno Franceschini additional original music Marcel Vaid

performed by Martin Schumacher (bass clarinet) Martin Biernstil (cello) Pardeep Schroeder (guitar, piano)


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translations from Riva Evstifeeva the Russian Lucia Sgueglia editing assistants Chiara Ronchini Alkmini Boura Sophie Brunner color grading Peter Guyer

Ueli Müller RecTV, Bern

sound editing Pedro Haldemann

Olivier JeanRichard himex:sounddesign

audio post-‐production DIE BASISberlin rerecording mixer Ansgar Frerich general manager Florian Beck line producer Tobias N. Siebert inhouse producer Frauke Ahlers stills photography Davide Monteleone subtitles Erik Smith (English) Frank Matter, Zoë Meyer (German) Manuela Vonwiller (French) Lucia Sgueglia (Italian) HISTORICAL VIDEO MATERIAL HISTORICAL VIDEO MATERIAL FROM THE ARCHIVES OF ECHO OF WAR (EKHO VOYNY) shot by Zainap Gashaeva, Fatima Gazieva, Tamara Kalaeva, Maya Shovkhalova and Taita Yunusova from 1994 to 2006 © Courtesy of Zainap Gashaeva and Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker (GfbV), Switzerland


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ADDITIONAL HISTORICAL VIDEO MATERIAL BY Petra Prokhaskova Andrei Babitsky © Courtesy of Zainap Gashaeva and Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker (GfbV), Switzerland EXCERPTS FROM THE FILM "GROZNY" (1987) directed by Ilies Tataev written by S. Lagutin and shot by U. Timofeev, a production of North Ossetian Television in cooperation with Chechen-‐Ingush Television. Footage courtesy of and provided by Gosteleradiofond, the State Fund of Television and Radio Programs ADDITIONAL MUSIC „EVERY 5TH IS FREE“ Written by Toni Vescoli Performed by Les Sauterelles © Courtesy of PM MUSIC in accordance with Düde Dürst and Toni Vescoli „SI TU VOIS MA MÈRE“ music and words: Bechet, Sidney (CA)/ Broussolle, Jean (A) © by Warner Chappell Music France SA courtesy of Intersong Musikverlag GmbH, a Warner/Chappell Music Company and with the kind permission of Sony Music Entertainment Switzerland GmbH PRODUCED WITH THE FINANCIAL SUPPORT OF Swiss Federal Office of Culture (FDHA) Fachausschuss Audiovision und Multimedia Basel/Baselland Amt für Kultur und Sport und Lotteriefonds Kanton Solothurn Kulturfonds Suissimage Migros -‐ Kulturprozent: Postproduktion Ernst Göhner Stiftung george foundation Georges und Jenny Bloch-‐Stiftung Evangelisch-‐Reformierte Landeskirche des Kantons Zürich Succès Passage Antenne SRG Succès Cinéma


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I.iii Festivals & Awards

as at August 25th, 2015:

• Visions du Réel 2015, Nyon, Switzerland, International Competition • Golden Apricot Film Festival 2015, Yerevan, Armenia, International Competition • Festival del Film Locarno 2015, Switzerland, Panorama Suisse • Busan International Film Festival 2015, South Korea, Wide Angle


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II. ESSAYS AND HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

II.i Ordinary Heroines – On Nicola Bellucci’s «Grozny Blues» An essay by Irena Brežná Creating a nation of terrorists out of a people is startlingly easy. The only thing needed is a war of information lifted from the old KGB manual, a few lunatics with explosive vests and chapters from the Koran, and the complacency, the apathy of the global public. Following this recipe, Russia bombed Chechnya into submission for over a decade, erected concentration camps, abducted, tortured, and executed ten thousand men, women, elderly, and children without even sanctions being imposed, without the existence of a Chechen war crimes tribunal – and which will likely never exist. “Restoring constitutional order” Vladimir Putin declared, calling his war crimes “anti-‐terrorist operations”. In the 1960s Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago “If there were a people in the gulag who always kept their pride, it was the Chechens”. Today we encounter them throughout Europe as traumatized asylum seekers. And it is still vaguely insinuated that Chechens are terrorists. Didn’t “Allahu Akbar!” shouting fanatics take an entire movie theater hostage in Moscow a few years ago and a school in Beslan? The radicalization of the armed Chechen resistance prospered from the bombed-‐out schools, and these bearded Salafists were not inopportune for the empire. That Russia has held an entire people hostage since it was first brutally colonized in the nineteenth-‐century, that Stalin deported it to the central Asian deserts and steppes, and that state terrorism has reigned in the North Caucasus region since December 1994, are all things people are not interested in acknowledging. Because then you would have to start thinking about and dealing with it. Nicola Bellucci’s film Grozny Blues is astounding for its poetic approach and its depiction of the eerie normality of everyday Chechen life. We follow three human-‐rights activists, passionate and motivated to act, who resist the forgetting of the atrocities in a quiet and persistent way. These are unspectacularly strong women who expose themselves to the horrors and suffering of the families whose daughters or sons have disappeared. While driving at night in a car through Grozny they laugh heartily. Inside this little capsule they seem so protected in the midst of omnipresent and arbitrary danger, so small under the giant portraits of the tyrant in so-‐called liberated Grozny. Nicola Bellucci could have focused on the horrors, there are enough for a thousand films, but he shows those who have preserved their dignity and humanity. And he also gives space to the silence induced by fear. An eloquent silence. When I travelled to Chechnya for the first time in early 1996 for a reporting assignment, in the middle of Yeltsin’s war, I consciously avoided the war’s victims and instead sought out the non-‐violent resistance. Earlier on television, I had seen women with large woolen headscarves who formed a human chain, holding hands together in an attempt to stop the Russian tanks from rolling toward Grozny. These were my heroines! In order to get past Russian checkpoints undetected and into the destroyed village of Sernovodsk, these female farmers tied the very same headscarf around my head.


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Zainap Gashaeva was also there in the acrid smell of smoldering Sernovodsk. She was filming mothers in the burned mosque who were pressing the charred remains of their sons to their chests while cursing the Russian soldiers. Since that time, a deep friendship connects me to Zainap. Undaunted, she keeps watch over the largest film and photo archive of human rights violations by the Russian army during both wars from 1994-‐97 and 1999 to 2008. This came about because this mother of four picked up her camera, which she hid under her skirt, and, putting her life on the line, rushed off to where the ethnic cleansings were happening. She was not alone; she had fellow activists. But instead of being commended now by her people for her preserving of the past, she had to escape four years ago as human-‐rights activist under threat, and was granted asylum in Switzerland. One of her companions is in exile in Belgium, while others hold out in Grozny. But for how much longer? What every Chechen family knows – death, abduction, mutilation – does not have a place in the city of glass facades that has been resurrected out of the ashes. Grozny was completely destroyed on Putin’s orders, who then financed its reconstruction. His understudy son and proconsul Ramzan Kadyrov orders the people to worship the Russian president in order to shore up his own power. Is there a worse indignity? The film allows us to sense this grief. And yet therein lies the resistance I have always admired so much in the Chechen people. Nicola Bellucci subtly shows how it lives on behind the bombastic facades. Irena Brežná, author and expert on Chechnya, www.brezna.ch


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II.ii The War, Friends, Love by Lucia Sgueglia, co-‐author

In 1994, as war broke out for the first time between Grozny and Moscow, thousands of Chechen women took to the streets to protest against the conflict and the abuses committed against local civilians by Russian troops—braving bombs, Moscow’s tanks, and a patriarchal society. It was in this very location, on the battlefield in 1995, during the march for peace that saw Russian and Chechen mothers protest together for the first time, where Zainap Gashaeva, a noted human rights activist, met Taita Yunusova, who would become her collaborator along with Fatima Gazieva. It is a friendship that would last years, enduring geographical distances, and separations. With video camera in hand and risking their lives, they began to record everything they saw over the years: war crimes, abuses against civilians, bombings, corpses and the wounded, the testimonies of survivors, political events marking the history of Chechnya. Always on the go, far from their families, with the urgency of recording the horrors for a future memory. The result is an archive comprising hundreds of hours of audiovisual material of the period from 1994-‐2005 (from the first to the second Chechen war, through its short-‐lived independence to the Kadyrov era), the only one of its kind, today preserved in Bern. Because of the archive Zainap was forced in 2010 to leave Chechnya and her work behind, and found refuge and political asylum in Switzerland. Taita Yunusova, on the other hand, remains in Grozny, continuing to work on human rights. Facing thousands of difficulties and obstacles, she travels today between remote mountain villages to teach young schools girls about equality between men and women. Zargan Makhadzhieva and Tais Titieva also live in Grozny. They work for an NGO, Niiso (Justice), located just behind Putin’s Avenue. Every day dozens of mothers and the relatives of those killed and who went missing during and after the war continue to pass through the doorway of their tiny office to complain, cry, seek a response or at least minimal financial compensation. But they have replaced the heroism of twenty years ago with caution, an inevitable outcome during the Kadyrov regime. Today it is Zargan and Tais who continue Zainap’s work: returning to record the same victims of that time, collecting new testimonies of abuses to complete the archive, and perhaps, one day, to achieve justice. Running up against mistrust and fears, unfamiliar during the time of the war. Today, for the three friends remaining in Grozny, the will to continue the fight for human rights collides with a reality of heavy compromises, a political power that oppresses women by decree, a chauvinist and patriarchal society, and personal bankruptcy. Women liberated in war, but prisoners in peace. From the civil and political activism of the 1990s to a present-‐day regime interested in relegating them to a “traditional” role of looking after the household. Prisoners, also, of a relationship between the sexes codified to the last detail, always to the disadvantage of women. Women without men, with lives shattered by war even in private: single or in a bad marriage, divorced and without children. Twenty years later, Zainap has paradoxically rediscovered family in exile. Taita preferred solitude to an abusive husband, and Tais, after agreeing to become the second wife of an already married man just to have a son, acknowledges the failure and decides to get divorced. Zargan is forced to marry a man she does not love in


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order to obey her father and Chechen traditions. All three pay a heavy price for refusing to play by the rules of the system, but they do not give up fighting to keep their jobs and their dignity as women. Humans Without Rights

“Everyone knows everything here, but no one dares tell the truth.“ (Khava Usdamirova, mother of Enisa Ibragimova)

Today in Chechnya there are almost 400 officially registered “humanitarian organizations.” Among these is Niiso, an NGO run by Zargan, where Tais also works. But no one is allowed to work independently, especially after the new Russian law that labels NGOs financed from abroad as “foreign agents,” or deal with crimes committed by Kadyrov and his circle against the Chechen population after the war. And no one even dares to report these anymore. Twenty years after the start of the first Chechen war, the serious violations of human rights committed in Chechnya remained largely unpunished. Over five thousand people are still missing without a trace. Abducted by federal forces or mysterious “death squads” with masked faces during the notorious zachistke (round ups) that continued during Kadyrov’s reign. Thousands of women and mothers are still searching today for their sons, brothers, husbands. Like the two young boys, Enisa Ibragimova, born 1988, and Hava Abdulazizova, born 1989, seized by “unknowns” in camouflage in September 2009 and never found again. No criminal investigation into their disappearance has ever been opened. But, above all else, looking into present-‐day crimes is absolutely taboo. Those who have attempted to investigate them, like Anna Politkovskaya, have paid with their lives. And the defense of human rights in Chechnya, under Kadyrov, has become synonymous with “treason.” In a TV interview in 2010, Kadyrov called the employees of Memorial, the best known Russian NGO for human rights also based in Grozny, “enemies of the people and of Russia, enemies of law, enemies of the state.” Under his reign, human rights work in Chechnya has become impossible. After the murder of N. Estemirova in 2009 all foreign NGOs left the republic, and Memorial adopted a low profile, “contracting out” its work in the field to the Committee against Torture, a group of Russian lawyers based in the Urals, in order to avoid putting at risk the lives of their local activists. Their office was twice destroyed and set on fire between 2014 and 2015. Human rights, in short, defended by proxy.


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II.iii The Age Of Compromise by Lucia Sgueglia, co-‐author

“The Chechens are a combative people, difficult to conquer, easier to buy.” (Alexey Ermolov, Czarist General, 1810)

Chechnya today is both Vladimir Putin’s strongest and weakest point of power. The strongest because the Russian leader, who rose to power after Boris Yelstin between 1999 and 2000, in the wake of the second war between Moscow and Grozny, succeeded in returning the turbulent republic of the Caucasus, reduced by two ferocious civil wars and the chaos of the early 2000s, to obedience and relative stability. Transforming Gronzy, raised to the ground at his behest in 2000 by Russian troops, into a showcase of reconstruction and the “rebirth” of the republic now loyal to Moscow. But the Chechnya of today is also the weakest point of Putin’s Russia because it was subjugated with an iron fist, in total disregard of the human rights of its inhabitants. A civil society that has been decimated, a non-‐existent political opposition, and a regime in which even privacy, the freedom of private citizens is controlled from above. A peace without pacification: where serious grievances still smolder, deep-‐seated hatreds, and a thirst for revenge in every family for the terrible crimes against humanity committed during and after the war, all unpunished. It is a bitter defeat for the Chechens, a people once proud of their identity and independence, now at the edge of anarchy. Buried is the dream of separatist independence, tested by ten years of conflict and at least 160,000 victims according to the Chechen government, half of them civilians, their land destroyed, thousands of refugees and missing persons, their wills made to bend: “anything is better than war” it is often repeated. They were also forced to swallow the humiliation of a history rewritten by the winners, and of a memory erased, from the deportation in 1944 at the hands of Stalin to the war. Today Putin, who bombed Grozny in 1999 vowing to “hunt down and liquidate Chechen terrorists even in the toilets,” is a “benefactor” lauded and thanked every minute on local TV. 2000 is Chechnya’s year zero: prior to the Russian reconquest, history does not exist. Russia and Chechnya, which fought from 800 to the times of Imam Shamil, are now defined as “friends for centuries and through the centuries.” The Kremlin calls this “normalization.”


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Kadyrov, from Former Rebel to Putin’s Vassal

“It is an old story: the Kremlin fosters a baby dragon, which it then has to keep feeding to stop him from setting everything on fire.”

(A. Politkovskaya, 2004) Today everything rests on a single figure: Ramzan Kadyrov, the thirty-‐eight year old leader of Gronzy, Putin’s lieutenant in the Caucasus. A former rebel transformed into the Kremlin’s most faithful ally. To the tune of billions of rubles sent from Moscow. The pact is clear: “Money in exchange for loyalty to Russia.” Following the assassination of Kadyrov’s father Akhmat, Putin entrusted him with governing Chechnya, giving him carte blanche. The order: bring stability back to the republic by any means necessary. Kadyrov jr. complied: with his private militias, the infamous “Kadyrovtsy,” which according to local and international human rights defenders is guilty of terrible abuses of civilian Chechens in the period after the war: kidnappings, torture, summary executions, arbitrary arrests. Violence and abuses, initially committed by Russian federal troops, now becomes the monopoly of local officials. With total impunity. It is the so-‐called “Chechenization” of the conflict wanted by Putin. Collective Punishment. A “Family Affair” Kadyrov also takes advantage of the opportunity to eliminate his own enemies. And in suffocating any spark of rebellion, he frequently labels opponents of any kind as “Islamist rebels”: a way of facilitating their elimination without the need for arrests or trials. For every rebel killed, real and alleged, Grozny receives substantial ad hoc anti-‐terrorist funding from Moscow. Recently the Chechen leader has also adopted the Stalinist method of “collective responsibility”: burning the houses of the families of the Islamist terrorists, considered accomplices of their crimes and expelling them from Chechnya. Fathers who refuse to denounce their rebel sons “are punished.” Kadyrov now governs Chechnya like his personal fiefdom, a “family affair.” Handing out money and favors to his relatives and members of his government. “One law is in effect here: whatever Ramzan says,” sum up the Chechens. Today Chechnya is in fact an autonomous entity, in which the Russian presence is almost invisible. Paradoxically, Kadyrov has realized the dream of separatists from the early 1990s: he has created his version of an independent Ichkeria (the name given to the republic by those fighting for independence), and without fighting Moscow. In a certain sense he has won the war. But the Chechen people have lost. A Reconstruction of the Façade In recent years, despite the crisis and the nuisance of the Russians, Ramzan has continued to spend Moscow’s funds like a Gulf sheikh with delusions of grandeur, luxury, and kitsch. In early 2000, Grozny was a landscape of ruins, like Dresden in 1944, the “most destroyed city in the world,” according to UNESCO. Today it is rebuilt anew, a mix of skyscrapers, stadiums, cafes, trendy stores, and shopping centers. A city of plastic at the center of which, in a


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mockery of fate, lies Putin’s Avenue: the name Kadyrov chose for the city’s main boulevard in 2009, known in Soviet times as Victory Avenue. But the reconstruction is only a façade. The majority of the population remains poor and unemployed. No factories have been built, and corruption has skyrocketed: no one can get a job without Ramzan’s approval, or open a private company. Fifteen years after the official end of the conflict nearly 90% of Grozny’s budget comes from Moscow, the economy is non-‐existent, totally dependent on the federal center—a deliberate Kremlin strategy to avoid the possible rebirth of separatism. Youth and Propaganda The second pillar in Kadyrov’s reign is relentless propaganda: his primary target is young Chechens, who are indoctrinated from childhood: at school, in the Islamic madrasses, via television, forcibly enrolled in patriotic, pro-‐Putin clubs or ones dedicated to Father Kadyrov, appointed ministers, mayors, or councilors of the leader from morning to night, and courted on Instagram—where Kadyrov_95 has nearly 1 million followers. Youth raised in the cult of Putin, sons of fathers killed fighting against Moscow for Chechnya’s independence. Also bewildering is the conflicting input from above: a mix of Islamic rigor, Russian law, Chechen adat, and the whims of Ramzan. From globalization and enticements of the West, capitalism and consumption, to an ever-‐expanding Internet and calls for jihad. Mixed messages also on TV: local channels broadcasting traditional dance twenty-‐four hours a day, or sermons and readings from the Koran, mixed with ads and government news; the Russian channels showing leggy moderators and Big Brother. For many, the “secular” Russia of Putin glimpsed through the cathode ray tube, relative to Grozny, is a beacon of liberty. This has produced a schizophrenic Chechen identity: in terms of morals, culture, faith, ideology, or modes of behavior. One that is divided between the Soviet past and present-‐day Russian, Islamic, Caucasian traditions and Arab-‐oriental influences (for Kadyrov the models are Dubai and Turkey). Islamification Kadyrov has also wrested from Putin the religious freedom that rebels dreamed of in the 1990s. But his is a “patriotic” Islam, loyal to Putin. Banned are the radical “Wahhabis,” enemies of Moscow; he has propagated and spread a kind of “domesticated Islam,” considered heretical by many Muslims around the world: a mix of Sufism (a moderate current of Islam prevalent in the North Caucasus), and sharia, the medieval law of retaliation. Ignoring the Russian constitution, he has issued a series “informal edicts” that everyone must respect: a ban on alcohol, mandatory veils for women in public buildings and schools. These are diktats of moral behavior used to control the people politically and as weapons against those who oppose (frequently accused of “amoral” lifestyles). It is justified as a “return to the roots” and to unspecified “traditional values and customs,” which in reality have little to do with authentic Chechen traditions. Suffering the most is the generation that grew up secular and multicultural in the USSR, which is now remembered paradoxically as an era of freedom, provoking nostalgia.


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Chechen Bio-‐politics The first victims are women. The controlling of morals is hard and unforgiving on them, much more so than on men. They receive the severest penalties for any “transgression”: rebels who dare to disobey, especially young ones, are shamed in public or reprimanded on live TV by Kadyrov himself, including threats and personal or even physical humiliation. Their reputation is “ruined” in accordance with ancient culture. The sexual sphere and relations between men and women are closely monitored. But even here many contradictions exist. Beginning with the veil: for many women it is nothing but a hypocritical shield, a farce. They put it on and take it off according to the occasion, exiting and entering school, university, offices, ministries, where covering oneself is obligatory. This is symptomatic of a faith that is insincere and not lived. Others choose it as a fashion statement, made cool and glamorous by skillful TV propaganda. The image of the “ideal women” in Chechnya today is a mix between obedient housewife and a geisha, veiled and sexy. In reality, the women frequently work to also support the men. In fact Chechnya still has today one of the highest unemployment rates in Russia. And the men, accustomed to fighting for twenty years, unless they are part of the privileged class close to Kadyrov, have no other choice but to work carrying a weapon in the local security forces. Pride in Exile The Chechens are a people of the diaspora. In Europe alone the community has at least seventy thousand members, most of who fled during the wars. Tens of thousand of others live between Turkey and the Middle East, Kazakhstan, and Jordan, heirs of the Chechens deported in 1944. Among them are numerous former leaders and militant rebels in exile. Many still support the cause for independence from afar in various ways. Meanwhile in Grozny, the rewriting of Chechen history also continues at their expense: now the separatists from the 1990s—once hailed as national heroes for all Chechens—are called “devils” and “terrorists.” “Putin’s Infantry” With the conflict in Ukraine, Kadyrov has made another step forward in the distorting of Chechen history: in order to appease Moscow he sent his men to fight and die incognito in Donbass. Today Putin vociferously defends the “right to self-‐determination” on behalf of the pro-‐Russian separatists: a right that he always denied the Chechens. Twenty years after the beginning of the first war of independence, Chechnya has thus become the most faithful republic in the federation, a stronghold of loyalists to Putin. At least according to its leader: Kadyrov says he is “willing to do anything” for the czar. “We are Putin’s infantry, ready to obey his every command, wherever in the world,” he shouted in December in the stadium in Gronzy, surrounded by twenty thousand Kadyrovtsy, heavily armed and wearing backpacks.


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Bigots of Russia, Unite! Kadyrov “Model Patriot” The Chechen paradox can be explained by Russia’s parallel ideological evolution, which, after the Ukrainian crisis, devolved into a more stringent resurgence of nationalism and a Christian-‐orthodox brand of neo-‐conservatism that gave birth, for example, to an “anti-‐gay law,” and which suits Kadyrov’s “Islamic bigotry” well. Putin’s vassal also in obscurantism, the Chechen dictator, following the Charlie Hebdo affair, gathered over half a million people in Grozny’s main square to protest against “Western” press freedoms under the slogan “We love Mohammed! Hands off the Prophet!”, “Go to hell, French journalists!” And threatening the liberal opponents who had embraced the Je suis Charlie campaigne: “The Kremlin punishes them, Russian Muslims will not have infinite patience.” Ramzan is a “model patriot” for Russia: while he may be seen, on the one hand, as the only bulwark against Islamic fundamentalism in the Caucasus, he is, on the other, radicalizing Chechnya. Risks for the Future

In Moscow many accuse Ramzan of having too much power, of having become too dangerous for the Kremlin. Putin could lose control of Ramzan the “little dragon”, they say, or Ramzan might even hold him hostage. But it is a two-‐way blackmail: Ramzan cannot do without Putin, and for now Putin does not have an alternative leader for Gronzy—Chechnya’s stability is one of the important pillars of his power, and the cornerstone of peace in the Caucasus. But it is a powder keg capable of igniting at any moment.


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II.iv Historical Background

First Chechen War

The First Chechen War took place over a two-‐year period that lasted from 1994 to 1996, when Russian forces attempted to regain control over Chechnya, which had declared independence from Moscow in November 1991, shortly before the fall of the Soviet Union. Despite overwhelming numerical superiority in men, weaponry, and air support, the Russian forces were unable to establish effective permanent control over the mountainous area due to numerous successful full-‐scale battles and insurgency raids by the Chechen side. For three months, Russia lost more tanks (over 1,997 tanks) in Grozny than during the Battle of Berlin in 1945. The Budyonnovsk hospital hostage crisis in 1995 shocked the Russian public and led to international condemnation of the Chechen rebels.

In April 1996, the Chechen separatist leader, Dzhokhar Dudayev, was killed by the Russian FSB with two laser guided missiles fired from a warplane, which had voice recognition equipment triangulated on Dudayev’s position.

All the moderate Chechen leaders were assassinated, leaving only a handful of extreme militants. Thousands of Russian civilians left Chechnya after the first war.

The widespread demoralization of the Russian forces in the area and a successful offensive to re-‐take Grozny by Chechen resistance forces led by Aslan Maskhadov prompted Russian President Boris Yeltsin to declare a ceasefire in 1996, and sign a peace treaty a year later that saw a withdrawal of Russian forces from the Chechen territory.

Known as the famous Khasavyurt Accord it effectively delayed the question of Ichkeria’s status until the end of 2001. Russia never recognized Chechnya’s independence. Georgia and the Afghan Taliban were the only ones to endorse it internationally.

Inter-‐war Period

After the war, parliamentary and presidential elections took place in January 1997 in Chechnya and brought to power Aslan Maskhadov, the first and last democratically elected President of Chechnya, chief of staff and prime minister in the Chechen coalition government, for a five-‐year term. Maskhadov sought to maintain Chechen sovereignty while pressing Moscow to help rebuild the republic, whose formal economy and infrastructure were virtually destroyed. Russia continued to send money for the rehabilitation of the republic; it also provided pensions and funds for schools and hospitals (though later payments became irregular, partial and suffered delays). Most of these funds were taken by Chechen authorities and divided between favored warlords. Nearly half a million people (40% of Chechnya’s prewar population) had been internally and externally displaced and

lived in refugee camps or overcrowded villages. There was an economic downturn. Two Russian brigades were permanently stationed in Chechnya.


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In lieu of the devastated economic structure, kidnapping emerged as the principal source of income countrywide, procuring over $200 million during the three-‐year independence of the chaotic, fledgling state, although victims were rarely killed. In 1998, 176 people were kidnapped, ninety of whom were released, according to official accounts. President Maskhadov started a major campaign against hostage-‐takers, BUT on October 25, 1998, Shadid Bargishev, Chechnya’s top anti-‐kidnapping official, was killed in a remote-‐controlled car bombing. Political violence and religious extremism, blamed on “Wahhabism,” was rife. In 1998, Grozny authorities declared a state of emergency. Tensions led to open clashes between the Chechen National Guard and Islamist militants, such as the July 1998 confrontation in Gudermes.

Second Chechen War

On August 7, 1999, a group of around 2000 fighters of the Islamic International Peacekeeping Brigade (IIPB) lead by Shamil Basayev and Ibn-‐al-‐Khattab launched an unsuccessful incursion into the neighbouring Russian republic of Dagestan, in favor of the Shura of Dagestan (local separatist Islamist rebels) which sought independence from Russia. In September, a series of apartment bombs that killed around 300 people in several Russian cities, including Moscow, were blamed on the Chechen separatists. Some journalists and independent experts contested the official explanation, instead blaming the Russian Secret Service for blowing up the buildings to initiate a new military campaign against Chechnya. In response to the bombings, a prolonged air campaign of retaliatory strikes against the Ichkerian regime and a ground offensive that began in October 1999 marked the beginning of the Second Chechen War. Much better organized and planned than the first Chechen War, the Russian military took control over most regions. After the re-‐capture of Grozny in February 2000, the Ichkerian regime fell apart.

2000/2015: Post-‐war Period

In July 2000, with his control over the republic re-‐established, Putin appointed the religious leader Akhmat Kadyrov, former Chechen grand mufti and separatist who fought with Dudayev, who aligned himself with Russia during the second war, as head of the new interim administration.

Chechen rebels continued to fight Russian troops and conduct terrorist attacks. In October 2002, 40–50 Chechen rebels seized the Moscow Dubrovka theater and took about 900 civilians hostage. The crisis ended with a large death toll mostly due to an unknown aerosol pumped throughout the building by Russian special forces to incapacitate the people inside. In September 2004, separatist rebels occupied a school in the town of Beslan, North Ossetia, demanding recognition of the independence of Chechnya and a Russian withdrawal.

1,100 people (including 777 children) were taken hostage. The attack lasted three days, resulting in the deaths of over 331 people, including 186 children.


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In response to the increasing terrorism, Russia tightened its grip on Chechnya as well as expanded its anti-‐terrorist operations throughout the region. Russia installed a pro-‐Moscow Chechen regime in Grozny. In 2003, a referendum was held on a constitution that reintegrated Chechnya within Russia, but provided limited autonomy. According to the Chechen government, the referendum passed with 95.5% of the votes and almost 80% turnout. International observers were skeptical of the results, judging them far from fair. Akhmat Kadyrov was elected president of Chechnya. Just one year later, on May 9, 2004, he died in an attack at the stadium in Grozny during a Victory Day parade celebrating the defeat of Nazism. Alu Alkhanov replaces him. From 2005 to 2006, Ramzan Kadyrov, son of the late leader, serves as interim premier and his own power grows. On October 6 in Moscow, journalist Anna Politkovskaya is killed. She was known for her reporting on Chechnya in which she harshly criticized Kadyrov and his relationship with Putin.

In 2005 and 2006, prominent separatist leaders Aslan Maskhadov and Shamil Basayev were both killed by Russian special forces in blitz operations. In 2007, Putin nominates the son Ramzan Kadyrov president of Chechnya at just thirty years old, the minimum age to hold office. In April 2009, Russia officially ended its counter-‐terrorism operation and pulled out the bulk of its army. Insurgency in the North Caucasus continued even after this date. In July, Natalia Estemirova, Chechen activist working for the NGO Memorial, is found murdered in a field near the border with Ingushetia. She was a critic of the headscarf requirement imposed by Kadyrov on women, and was investigating allegations of torture committed by his men. A few days later aid worker Zarema Sadullayeva and her husband were also killed. The Chechen leader has been repeatedly suspected of involvement in murders like those of Politkovskaya and of several of his opponents abroad. In late 2014, following a period of relative calm in the republic, two serious attacks shook the center of Gronzy: at least twenty-‐five victims between terrorists and police. Shortly after the city office of the NGO Committee Against Torture, which had criticized the reprisals against the families of the rebels, was set on fire by “unknowns.” On February 27, 2015, Boris Nemtsov, one of the Russian opposition leaders, is killed in Moscow underneath the walls of the Kremlin. Thus far five suspects have been arrested for the murder, all of Chechen origin, some linked to Ramzan Kadyrov’s closest entourage. Investigations are still ongoing. (Lucia Sgueglia; with material from Wikipedia)


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II.v The Chechen Archive The Chechen Archive (in Bern) collects audiovisual materials related to the wars in Chechnya, which began in 1994. The initiator and main contributor of the current collection is human rights activist, Zainap Gashaeva. Materials received at the Chechen Archive are catalogued, digitized onto a long-‐term storage medium and preserved at a safe location. Because some videos were hidden underground for many years in Chechnya they required intensive restoration before they could be played and analyzed. One of the biggest challenges is the analysis of the materials which, having been filmed in a conflict context, are often chaotic and lacking in basic information necessary for human rights documentation. Where these facts can be extrapolated however, the information is recorded in a database accompanied by transcription and a link to the relevant footage. In addition to these recordings, the Chechen Archive also contains videos depicting scenes of historical importance. Most of the videos relate to the first war (1994-‐96) but the materials also cover the period through 2005. They cannot be accessed on-‐line for security reasons but the Archive’s catalogue can be browsed and copies made on request for purposes of public or legal redress, or if requested by a relative of a victim of the conflict. (Excerpted from the conference report “Memory, Truth and Justice in Chechnya,” copyright Shoma Chatterjee, Chechnya project coordinator, Society for Threatened Peoples)


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III. APPENDIX

III.i Press Quotes

««Grozny Blues» is a web of associations, suggestive and full of contrasts, a film without commentary or text inserts. A cinematic journey of multiple narratives that form together into a unified image, which has little to do with the clichés of the Kalashnikov-‐toting terrorists from the Caucasus. Instead we are presented with the simultaneity of destruction and everyday life in Chechnya, of a past that has been leveled and a surreal normality. (…) A form of carnival-‐esque subversion seems to be present in this post-‐war Chechnya. A kind of creative infiltration that Nicola Bellucci employs as a tool when swirling together different time periods in «Grozny Blues». He invokes the devastation until it runs through the veins of everyday existence and the office towers in Grozny seem like gravestones. He keeps those who have disappeared alive, as a form of ghostly consciousness in the present. He collides things together so that we can make our own connections. We are frightened – and illuminated.» Pascal Blum, Tages-‐Anzeiger, Zurich «This kaleidoscopic documentary offers fragmentary narratives (…) disturbing.» Bertrand Tappolet, Le Courrier, Geneva ««Grozny Blues» reconstructs both the past and the present of this traumatized region: two hours of goosebumps during which archival video material and manifestations of present-‐day neo-‐fascism and collective forgetting are presented.» Carlota Mosegui, El antepenúltimo mohicano, Cáceres, Spain «Every time «Grozny Blues» presents a relatively harmless image of everyday life in the city, every time when you can breath normally again, feel secure, and think that maybe it’s not that bad (in Chechnya), Nicola Bellucci shows excerpts from the video material that the women shot during the war, (it’s) full of destruction, misery, and death. (...) If there is no better future for Grozny in sight, then everyone should at least know about the events that led things down this path.» Mark Kuzmanic, Billet.ch ««Grozny Blues» is a journey as passionate as it is dramatic, into a paradoxical Chechnya divided between a phantasmagorical past and an apparently (post) apocalyptic future. The lucid and sensitive gaze of Nicola Bellucci explores this uncertain land, digs through the few remaining ruins to bring to light a past that screams otherworldliness. (...) «Grozny Blues» tries to give a voice to the ghosts haunting the Chechnyan capital using a complex system of echoes. The droning sound of revolutionary speeches, the dramatic images of war (bravely compiled by the three activists who are transformed in a common thread of the film) are often placed in parallel with the fake glitz of everyday life like a scream which, instead of going on forever, is blocked by a huge wall, bouncing back in the form of an echo, again and again.(...) Since talking about it is prohibited, another form of communication has come about, which Nicola Bellucci captures magnificently, made up of gestures, gazes, ghosts still lingering in the empty houses and laughter echoing in the ears of those who are left.


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The desperate testimonies of the few militants who still live in Grozny and the extraordinarily rich archive material that Bellucci brings to life in his film throw us into an extremely complex reality that of a dreamt-‐of Caucasus that became a nightmare. A deep and sensitive piece, which deserves our undivided attention.» Giorgia del Don, Cineuropa.org «Grozny Blues is a haunting, often dreamlike documentary about Chechen people caught between the contradictory pressures of manufactured realities and coerced silences. Right from the beginning, as the film opens with a quotation from Bertolt Brecht, ‘It said in the papers this morning that a new era has begun’ it is clear that director Nicola Bellucci’s documentary Grozny Blues, a masterful work about contemporary Chechnya, is fixated with contrasting today’s Chechnya – the Chechnya of Ramzan Kadyrov – with Chechnya’s past. (...) At the heart of this documentary are four women, and their dedication to preserving memory. During the first Chechen war, they traversed Grozny with a camera; methodically recording the death and destruction they found around them. Recalling those days, they say they had an agreement that if one of them were killed, the others would continue filming, explaining, ‘It’s not that we didn’t care about our lives. We knew that we had an important job to do.’ Bellucci follows these women today as they continue their work, now documenting abuses of Ramzan Kadyrov’s regime. They meet with families of those abducted and killed by Chechen security services, take down details of the kidnappings, listen to their pain. As one of the protagonists says to a visitor whose child disappeared, ‘We cannot find the culprits and punish them, but maybe there are other ways to help you.’ The heroic significance of these women’s work becomes clear when considering the social and political environment in today’s Chechnya. Kadyrov, after assuming the position of head of the republic in 2007, continues to promote pro-‐Russian ideologies in exchange for support from Moscow. He has balanced elite interests by co-‐opting them, stabilised the economy, and ruled through his notorious security forces. His total dominance requires absolute allegiance and silence about anything that criticises either the Chechen or Russian regime. The women’s footage, unique and rare, emerges as even more precious with this background – it highlights their efforts to preserve memory as an act of resistance to that dominance. (...) It becomes clear that those who do not share Kadyrov’s view of the ‘given’ or the ‘natural’ origins of Chechens’ values and national disposition are rejected from the national narrative. By maintaining control over social representations, Kadyrov retains control over the dynamics of national identity, a situation, which highlights internal divisions among the Chechens on a religious basis while simultaneously reducing the political tensions between Chechens and Russians – something Kadyrov has exploited to his benefit. This advantage to Kadyrov has come at a heavy price for the rest of the republic – the price of self-‐expression. Bellucci exactly captures the silence that permeates everything in Chechnya – the reluctance of children to talk about whether they experience injustice at school, the empty house left behind by one of the women protagonists before she was forced to leave Chechnya for Belgium, and the photographs of the families of the missing and the murdered.» Karena Avedissian, opendemocracy.net


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III.ii Bio-‐/Filmographies Director, Producer, Co-‐author

NICOLA BELLUCCI, director

Nicola Bellucci, born 1963 in Arezzo (Italy), studied at the University of Florence philosophy, literature and film. 1988 He obtained the directing diploma at the Istituto di scienze cinematografiche, Firenze. By 1992 he was working as an author and director of photography in Italy. Four years later, he moved to Basel (Switzerland) where he lives ever since. In the year 2010, Bellucci realized his first documentary feature, «Nel giardino dei suoni», which won numerous international awards. filmography as a director:

2015 GROZNY BLUES. Documentary feature 2010 NEL GIARDINO DEI SUONI. Documentary feature 2002 ONOMA. Six short films for Swiss Expo 02 2001 DO IT. Short film, Regione Toscana -‐ RAI 3 1994 SITUATIONSANSATZKONKRET. Educational video 1989 ERA LA NOSTRA FONTE. Short fiction film Festivals & awards «Nel giardino dei suoni»:

• Prix de Soleure, 2010 • Best Documentary, Mostra Internacional de Cinema 2010, Sao Paolo, Brasil • Grand Prix, Taiwan International Documentary Film Festival 2010 • Audience Award, Festival dei popoli 2010, Florence, Italy • Mention Spéciale, Film Prize of the City of Basel, 2009 (short version)


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• Best Documentary, Festa del documentario "Hai Visto Mai?" 2011, Siena, Italy • Special Mention, The London International Documentary Festival 2011, UK • Vision du Réel Nyon 2010, Switzerland • Mostra Internacional de Cinema 2010, Sao Paolo, Brasil • Festival dei Popoli 2010, Florence, Italy • Taiwan International Documentary Festival 2010, Taichung • Palm Springs International Film Festival 2011, USA (Best of Fest selection) • Margaret Mead Film Festival 2010, New York, USA • Docaviv Festival 2011, Tel Aviv, Israel • Thessaloniki Documentary Festival -‐ Images of the 21st Century 2011, Greece • Full Frame Documentary Film Festival 2011, Durham, USA • The London International Documentary Festival 2011, UK • Reykjavik International Film Festival 2011, Iceland • Bergamo Film Meeting 2011, Italy • Minneapolis-‐St. Paul International Film Festival 2011, USA • Reel Music Festival 2011, Portland, Oregon, USA • The Finnish Red Cross Film Festival 2011, Turku, Finland • Festa del Documentario Hai Visto Mai? 2011, Siena, Italy • Reframing Reality 2011, Jerusalem, Israel • DMZ Korean International Documentary Festival 2011, Paju, South Korea • Docaviv Galilee Film Festival 2011, Galilee, Israel • iDocs International Documentary Forum 2011, Beijing, China • Festival de Cine Internacional de Ourense 2010, Spain • Sprout Festival New York 2011, USA • Taipeh Golden Horse Festival (DocDay) 2010, Taiwan • Sguardi sul Reale 2011, Terranuova Bracciolini, Italy • Festival DiversArte 2011, Bari, Italy • Solothurner Filmtage 2010, Switzerland


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FRANK MATTER, producer Frank Matter, born in 1964, first worked as a reporter for various Swiss magazines and newspapers. 1992 he got into filmmaking as an assitant director on Peter Aschwanden’s «Unzucht – Ermittlungen im Fall des Pädophilen H.». A year later he moved to Brooklyn, where he has been working for many years as a director, producer, writer and reporter. After returning to Basel in 2006, he founded the film production company soap factory GmbH. His films have garnered numerous international awards. filmography as a producer: 2015 GROZNY BLUES by Nicola Bellucci 2015 LA VIDA BUENA by Jens Schanze 2015 THOMAS HIRSCHHORN – GRAMSCI MONUMENT by Angelo A. Lüdin 2010 NEL GIARDINO DIE SUONI by Nicola Bellucci 2000 JUDGE NOT by Robert Champi as a director, producer, writer: PARALLEL LIVES (in development). Documentary feature 2012 VON HEUTE AUF MORGEN. Documentary feature 2004 THE DEFINITION OF INSANITY. Fiction feature 1999 THE BEAUTY OF MY ISLAND. Documentary short 1997 MOROCCO. Fiction feature 1994 HANNELORE. Fiction short

LUCIA SGUEGLIA, co-‐author

Lucia Sgueglia (b. 1975) is a freelance reporter based in Moscow since 2007 who covers Russia and the former Soviet Union for several Italian media outlets including La Stampa, and Italian Swiss Radio (RSI). Most of her work in Russia has focused on the Northern Caucasus and Chechnya, where she has spent several months time since 2007. A series of fictional pieces inspired by these travels appeared in the photobook Red Thistle by D. Monteleone, published in four EU countries and languages in July 2012. She is currently writing a book about life today in Grozny.


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III.iii Contact

Production

soap factory GmbH Hafenstrasse 25 Postfach CH-‐4019 Basel Frank Matter Loredana-‐Nastassja Fernández [email protected] +41-‐61-‐6320050 www.soapfactory.ch www.facebook.com/soapfactoryfilms World Sales

Antipode Sales & Distribution Novolesnoy pereulok 5-‐38 Moscow, 127055 Russia Elena Podolskaya (Head of sales) elena@antipode-‐sales.biz +7-‐499-‐9787314 Cell: +7-‐916-‐6045884 www.antipode-‐sales-‐biz Distribution Switzerland

cineworx GmbH Clarastrasse 42 CH-‐4005 Basel Pascal Trächslin [email protected] +41-‐61-‐2616370 www.cineworx.ch

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