– BERLINALE 2026: Patric Chiha lays bare the phantom pains and hopeless solitude of young Russian exiles who fled their country at the very start of the war
“To plunge into the unknown and discover what emerges from it.” Accustomed to avoiding conventional paths, Austrian filmmaker Patric Chiha (The Beast in the Jungle [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Patric Chiha
film profile], If It Were Love [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Patric Chiha
film profile], Domaine [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile]) has this time chosen to approach the Russo-Ukrainian war through a documentary entirely different from the vast body of work that has addressed the subject since the outbreak of the conflict four years ago. Unveiled in the Panorama section of the 76th Berlinale, A Russian Winter gives voice to several young Russians frozen within the floating and complex world of an exile suspended in time and of an impossible future…
“Death to all Russians: every country rejects us. We are not victims, but we can rely only on ourselves and those close to us.” Having taken the first available flights to Georgia, Turkey or Kazakhstan at the very start of Putin’s “special operation”, in a heightened state of agitation, unreality, fear and paranoia – often linked to their activism against the regime – the participants discovered by the director describe the kind of temporal rift into which they subsequently fell, and in which they now remain suspended.
A long wandering between different territories while awaiting a visa for Western Europe; altering their appearance on social media with AI in order to protect their identity; the complex maintenance of long-distance ties with families,sometimes supportive of the war (one father notably enlisted with Wagner and quickly died on the front); psychological and economic anxiety about the future; nostalgia for the homeland, guilt, loss of empathy and growing cynicism, depression, fading memory, emotional numbness, and more – time, inexorably suspended, weighs heavily on confused emotions and a pervasive solitude.
This limbo-like existence – moving between storage units and aimless walks to pass the time – is revealed by Patric Chiha in fragments, through first-person recollections of the past and conversations between the film’s two main protagonists: musician Yuri Nosenko (a teenage figure of the Moscow punk scene in the early 2000s with the band Anti-Utopia) and Margarita (stranded in Istanbul). Scattered with a few distinctly “arty” visual ideas (militarised Moscow streets rendered almost like X-rays in the opening, an uninhibited green-screen dance, sofas and mirrors, a picnic-party resembling an end-of-the-world masked ball) A Russian Winter remains above all a documentary built from fragmented voices. It evokes phantom pains and a profound sense of emptiness: an existential void born of forced exile and deepened by a difficult passage into adulthood. Already living on the fringes of the post-Soviet system, these rather self-centred personalities now find themselves becalmed between several worlds, like passengers on a train endlessly crossing the Russian winter.
A Russian Winter was produced by Aurora Films and co-produced by Le Fresnoy. Best Friend Forever handles international sales.
(Translated from French)
