A Documentary in Which Everything Is a Lie (Slate) {"Our New President"}

[eppur_se_muova]

Our New President retells the 2016 campaign through Russian propaganda.

By Sam Adams
Jan 19, 2018 1:14 PM

Can you make a documentary in which nothing is true? That was the initial idea behind Maxim Pozdorovkin’s Our New President, which made its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival Thursday night. Pozdorovkin, who was raised in Moscow and wrote his Harvard Ph.D. dissertation on the history of Soviet propaganda, set out to retell the story of the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign entirely through clips from Russia’s most popular TV news channels, whose coverage wasn’t slanted in favor of Donald Trump so much as it was completely atilt.

In one sequence, Russia 1 network anchor Dmitry Kiselyov, who effectively runs all of the country’s major news outlets since Putin consolidated power under him in 2013, comments on footage of Barack Obama and then-incoming Donald Trump’s first White House meeting by saying Trump has the bearing of “an English lord,” while Obama is “throwing his arms about as if he was in the jungle.” It’s a shocking moment, enough so that the network later re-edited the clip and attempted to scrub it from the internet, but it only makes text what is the subtext of so much right-wing U.S. coverage. As Russian news anchors calmly explain how Hillary Clinton collapsed in public and is suffering brain damage, you wonder how the Russians could swallow this nonsense, and then you remember how many Americans did as well.

At under 80 minutes, Our New President is a brief but head-spinning immersion into an alternate universe where Hillary Clinton is cursed by an ancient mummy and Donald Trump is somehow the savior of both the U.S. and Russia, a leader whom Russians take to heart while crowing about how his election represents the most significant Russian victory since they annexed Crimea. On the eve of the film’s Sundance debut, Pozdorovkin talked to me about fake news, why Russians love Trump and hate Obama, and why documentaries need to be less earnest. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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more (including video): https://slate.com/culture/2018/01/sundance-doc-retells-the-2016-campaign-via-russian-propaganda.html
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt6617656/



On Friday's(?) Deadline: White House, Steve Schmidt mentioned that he had seen this film a couple of days ago, and commented on the content. This was in response to an excellent question by Nicolle Wallace about how previous US presidents had responded to Russian agression with firmness, but 45 refuses to do so. Schmidt's answer seems to veer away from the topic, but in fact, it probably provides the answer: "Our" President is the term used by the Russian state-run "news" media to refer to -- Donald Trump.