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Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
Directed by Andrei Nekrasov Produced by Olga Konskaya Written by Nekrasov & Konskaya Director of Photography, Sergei Tsikhanovich & Marcus Winterbauer Edited by Konskaya & Andrei Nekrasov Music by Irina Bogushevskaya Released by Kino International Language: Russian & English with English subtitles Russia. 105 min Not Rated With Alexander Litvinenko, Boris Berezovsky, André Glucksmann, Marina Litvinenko, Andrei Lugovoi, Anna Politkovskaya & Vladimir Putin As he lay dying from a lethal dose of Polonium-210, Russian dissident and ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko said on camera, “If anything should happen to me, I beg you to show this tape to the whole world.” Director Andrei Nekrasov could have simply used Litvinenko’s words and the transparent evidence of his murder to incriminate Russian officials in this and countless other crimes. Instead, Nekrasov chose to bolster the case with a full-blown video exposé of far-reaching government corruption in an effort to show the whole world the whole story. In Poisoned by Polonium, Nekrasov illuminates the unbroken thread connecting Soviet barbarity with the scandalous tactics of those currently in power, most notably President Vladimir V. Putin. The whistle-blowing documentary stitches together myriad examples of the Kremlin and FSB’s (the post-soviet KGB) very undemocratic dealings – from suppression of free speech to extortion, assassination, and even connections with organized crime. The few specific examples culled from the long list of bad behavior include the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya and the bombing of a Moscow apartment building – widely theorized to be the work not of Chechen rebels but of the Russian government, which used it as an excuse to wage war against the volatile Caucasus province. It seems that in order to communicate this almost epic treatise on contemporary Russia without overwhelming his audience, Nekrasov presents the facts in an arty, often dizzying disorder. He constantly shifts from grainy old news clips to focused first-person accounts, from black and white to color, from Russian bards to rock and roll, creating a strident but powerful symphony of grievances against Putin’s regime. His gripping style sometimes comes at the price of clarity, leaving us wondering what we just saw in an emotional jumble of footage. Yet Nekrasov also devotes uninterrupted segments to a few fascinating interviews.
Counting on a tolerably well-informed audience, Nekrasov seems less interested in telling us what we should already know than in synthesizing that
information to elicit some kind of response. In a brilliant directorial move, he never actually builds a case against Litvinenko’s alleged killers –
two ex-KGB agents who met with him the day he fell ill. Instead, he builds a case against Russia itself, depicting a system so corrupt that ordering
the murder of a dissident in exile sounds not only possible but likely.
Yana Litovsky
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