Russian-Canadian filmmaker battles attempts to suppress controversial film as Ukraine launches probe

In the latest wrinkle in the journey of the highly controversial documentary Russians at War, the Security Service of Ukraine has reportedly opened a criminal investigation into Anastasia Trofimova, the film’s Russian-Canadian director.

“It’s troubling for me as a Canadian documentary filmmaker that there is an attempt to suppress my film through baseless and defamatory calls for investigations from both Ukraine and Canadian politicians and organizations,” Trofimova told the National Post on Thursday. “Not to mention the attempts to censor the selections of international film festivals.”

She added: “To those who oppose my film’s existence, they should watch it and understand the facts of its production. The vast majority of those who have seen Russians at War and have become familiar with how we made it agree that it is an anti-war film produced totally independent of any state authority. These attempts to censor and prosecute Russians at War are basically a disinformation campaign from those who want to dictate one narrative at the expense of other perspectives and stories.”

As reported in the Kyiv Independent this week, the announcement was made by Yaroslav Yurchyshyn, head of the parliamentary committee on freedom of speech, on Monday.

Yurchyshyn reportedly said he started the investigation because “it is Ukraine that should be the first to initiate Trofimova’s case.” He added that he would aim for “a tougher punishment for violating the Ukrainian law” — the law prohibits “material that justifies or recognizes legitimate Russian aggression against Ukraine” — than merely suspending Canadian taxpayer money to finance her movies.

Yurchyshyn requested the investigation last month on the grounds of a section of the Criminal Code of Ukraine. “Punishment if convicted is imprisonment for a period of five to eight years,” he said in a Facebook post.

The film has been met with a firestorm of criticism, condemned by politicians and pulled from festivals including the Toronto International Film Festival.

Russians at War offers a view of the conflict in Ukraine through the eyes of the Russian soldiers on the ground. According to the festival program guide, “they all come to realize that everything they heard about the war in Russian media is false. They begin to doubt their purpose — and fight only to survive.”

The film is a Canada-France co-production that received $340,000 in funding from the Canada Media Fund in 2022 through Ontario’s public broadcaster, TVO. The station announced in the wake of backlash against the film during TIFF that it would not be airing the documentary as planned.

The film has also been talked about in recent meetings of the House of Commons’ Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security, which is looking into Russian interference in Canada.

In a meeting of the group this week, Kristina Michaud, vice-chair of the committee, raised the question of whether Russians at War constituted Russian propaganda and what could be done about it. Guest Ben Scott, CEO of Reset Tech, a not-for-profit digital security firm, said he was unfamiliar with the film but that if it did not qualify as illegal speech it should be permitted in Canada.

“However,” he added, “that doesn’t mean that broadcasters or social media platforms have to amplify it and extend its audience for commercial reasons, beyond that which it would achieve on its own merits.”

In an earlier meeting, Alexandra Chyczij, president of the Canadian Ukrainian Congress, suggested that an investigation into Trofimova by the RCMP was warranted.

A petition before the House of Commons similarly calls for the government to “request that Canadian law enforcement agencies, including the RCMP and CSIS, investigate any potential violations of Canadian, Ukrainian, or international law by Ms. Trofimova during her activities in Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories (and) work with the RCMP to seize all materials collected and filmed as part of this production and examine them for potential evidence of Russian war crimes.”

TIFF had planned to screen Russians at War as part of its 2024 festival lineup. But it drew protests by Ukrainian officials, the Ukrainian-Canadian community, and even Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, who is of Ukrainian descent.

She spoke to reporters during the festival of the “grave concerns” of Ukrainians regarding the film, adding: “I share those concerns.”

She went on: “There is very clearly good and evil in this war. Ukrainians are fighting for their sovereignty and for democracy around the world … there can be no moral equivalency in our understanding of this conflict.”

TIFF ultimately decided not to show the film during the festival, citing “significant threats to festival operations and public safety.” It did, however, go ahead with several screenings at Toronto’s Lightbox cinema just after the festival ended.

Russians at War had already played the Venice film festival prior to TIFF, during which Ukraine’s state film agency had posted a message to Facebook denouncing the movie as “thinly veiled Russian propaganda” and adding: “We find any form of victimization or justification of aggression and war crimes by a terrorist state to be utterly unacceptable.”

The film is scheduled to play in additional festivals, including in Mumbai on Oct. 19 and Windsor, Ont., on Oct. 25 and 26. The Windsor International Film Festival organizers told CBC that the screenings there would go ahead as planned.

“The film is there to create discussion and debates,” Vincent Georgie, the Windsor festival’s executive director and chief programmer, told CBC in September. “I think what’s quite important in all of this is it’s a film that’s been very, very, very little seen by people, and that’s a really important piece.”

On Wednesday, Senator Donna Dasko posted to X a letter also signed by Senator Stanley Kutcher, imploring the festival to pull the film from its lineup, and noting that it could also win the festival’s $25,000 best Canadian film prize. “If successful, this would essentially reward a Kremlin mouthpiece,” they wrote.

Additionally, scheduled screenings at the Zurich film festival this week have been cancelled “for safety reasons.” Last week, two planned screenings at the Athens International Film Festival were also cancelled at the last minute.

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