We begin with April Wolfe, writing for Film Comment and introducing us to Maxim Pozdorovkin and Our New President, which “tells a thrilling, scary, mind-bending, and often-hilarious story of Russian propaganda’s role in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, constructed almost entirely of Russian newsreel footage, along with some very choice YouTube clips of Russian citizens enacting their comically severe distaste for Clinton and adoration for Trump. ‘We wanted to see if it was possible to make a documentary out of news without a single true statement in it,’ Pozdorovkin says. ‘The basic litmus test for what we would include was whether or not there was enough falsity in the claim in the clip.’”
“Depending on how much you’ve read about e.g. the international ‘news network’ Russia Today or its flagship anchorman Dmitri Kiselyov, Our New President will be eye-opening (for the totally uninformed), a useful side-dossier (for Russiagate moderate-level students), or a morbidly amusing refresher/anthology of the kitschiest crass propaganda Russian TV can offer (expert level),” writes Vadim Rizov in a dispatch back to Filmmaker. “As a morbid deep-diver into the worst conservative conspiracy theories the English-language net has to offer, some of this was still new to me—I’d seen memes about Hillary’s killer cough, sure, but not so much Russian astrological programs examining the ‘godlike’ lines in Trump’s hands, as parsed by ‘experts.’”
“Using every conceivable permutation of sound and image, Our New President is a film that tries to express something true about something false,” Pozdorovkin tells Filmmaker, which is also running an interview with Pozdorovkin and co-editor Matvey Kulakov, who says, “I had never seen movies quite like this one before, so there was no reference point that shaped the film from the outset. All we had was our intuition.”
Variety’s Owen Gleiberman finds Our New President “sometimes funny, and sometimes depressing (the film runs seventy-seven minutes, and you wouldn’t want it to be a minute longer). But mostly it’s scary, because what it reveals is that fake-news culture is now an escalating global phenomenon, a tidal wave of untruth that’s growing and surging in power: in Europe, in the United States, and in the authoritarian regimes—like Russia’s—that perfected this virus in the first place. It’s a brave new world, but in many ways it’s an old world, a medieval cosmos of strong-man heroes, and evil spirits doing battle, and more and more of the masses of men and women reduced to brainwashed pawns. The message of Our New President is that you can rail against fake news all you want, but the sinister bottom line is that fake news is getting bigger by the day. What’s shrinking? Reality, and democracy.”
“Granted, the framing device is a bit clunky, the cut-off point sometime around the Hamburg G20 conference seems a bit arbitrary, and the provenance of some clips a bit confusing,” writes Leslie Felperin in the Hollywood Reporter. “Nevertheless, this is still an impressively assembled work . . . It's worth stressing that there's no fresh news revealed here: All this material was already in the public domain, and the Russian press and public don't necessarily know any more about the extent of their government's tactics to shape the election than we in the West do. They're just less shocked by it.”
Our New President is one of three films Nicolas Rapold and Eric Hynes discuss in yesterday’s episode of the Film Comment Podcast (30’10”).
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