“There is nothing of value apart from truth.” In Words of War, a British-American film released this past spring, this statement is attributed to Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, whose fearless reporting on post-Soviet corruption and criminality led to renown in the West and a death sentence at home. On October 7, 2006, Politkovskaya was gunned down in the elevator of her Moscow apartment building, most probably by agents of the Chechen autocrat Ramzan Kadyrov, whose buffoonish but brutal rule was inherited from his father with the full support of Vladimir Putin.
Politkovskaya worked for Novaya Gazeta, one of the few independent newspapers to have survived in Putin’s Russia. Since its founding in 1993, the paper has won 20 international awards for the quality of its reporting—including the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize bestowed on the editor in chief, Dmitry Muratov. In March 2022, a month after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the paper was threatened with closure if the editors failed to support the official version of Putin’s “special military operation.”
Rather than let Novaya Gazeta get turned into a Kremlin mouthpiece, the editors suspended operations. In April 2022, a legally separate online news outlet, Novaya Gazeta Europe, appeared in Riga, the capital of Latvia, followed by another in Paris. Both were swiftly blocked in Russia, along with every other independent source of news—including the Russian-language news service of the U.S.-backed Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (which is now unfortunately in the crosshairs of the Trump Administration).
Against this backdrop, Words of War portrays Politkovskaya as a heroic figure of a type often admired in America: the intrepid reporter, war correspondent, whistleblower, or investigator who keeps digging until he or she gets the whole story of some egregious malfeasance. Americans admire this figure because most of us take for granted the idea that exposing malfeasance will raise public concern, and public concern will in turn create pressure on elected officials to address the problem.
Politkovskaya fits this mold in terms of courage and persistence, but not in terms of her work having the desired effect. In 1999, when she began writing for Novaya Gazeta, her colleagues no longer hoped that by practicing good journalism they would bring about a regime of civil and political liberty capable of redressing the many grievances of the long-suffering Russian people. In the moral vacuum of post-Soviet Russia, there was no redress for the lawlessness of the Russian military and its allies in Chechnya, and no curb on the ruthlessness and excess of former Communist Party officials vying for wealth and power. With Putin’s election in 2000, autocracy returned in a new guise, forcing Politkovskaya and her colleagues to shift their fading hopes onto “the international community,” as the United States and its allies were optimistically called.
Inauthentic, Tendentious, Clueless
Words of War seeks to capture that shift but does not fully succeed, for a couple of reasons. First is a lack of authenticity. For most films, especially political ones, an in-depth understanding of the particular place, time, and people is a necessary, if not sufficient, condition of artistic success. But James Strong, the director, is a veteran of British TV with no apparent experience or knowledge of Russia. And Maxine Peake, in the lead role, is a fine dyed-in-the-wool British actress who plays Anna as (you guessed it) a fine dyed-in-the-wool British journalist. The rest of the cast are also fine British actors, but they, too, seem to have taken a vow not to appear even slightly Russian. Or Chechen, for that matter.
Words of War is also politically tendentious. This shows up most clearly in the background to the final credits, which consists of dark billowing smoke and several photographs of journalists murdered for doing their job. Some of these grow larger, showing the journalists’ names, and then catch fire, while in the background smoke we see the face of the autocrats—Xi Jinping, Muhammed Bin Salman, Bashar al-Assad, Vladimir Putin—who ordered their deaths.
It’s a powerful sequence. But the first photo to catch fire is of an American sportswriter who in 2018 was killed along with four others at an Annapolis-based newspaper, and the face in the smoke is Donald Trump’s. At the time, Trump was baiting the news media as “the enemy of the people,” so a swarm of tweets accused him of ordering the attack. But cooler heads were soon reporting that the gunman was deranged and had been threatening the newspaper for seven years. It took me 30 seconds to find this correction online, but I guess that was too long for the producers of Words of War. Or perhaps in their zeal to equate Trump with Putin they decided the facts didn’t matter?
A subtler tendentiousness showed up in May, when the screenwriter, Eric Poppen, told an interviewer that he was drawn to Politkovskaya’s story because she was “a strong female protagonist” standing up to a powerful male leader, one of many “parallels there between what was happening in Russia” and what “was happening in the United States.” And he warned that with Trump elected for a second term, America could “very easily slide into authoritarianism.” Poppen has worked mostly in American film and TV, which may explain the cluelessness about Russia displayed in his next comment: “People forget that at one point Russia had a democracy; after the fall of the wall, they had a democratic government, Putin was elected prime minster and finally became president, and he took the country in a very dark place.”
Putin was not elected prime minister in 1999, he was appointed by Boris Yeltsin, in return for resurrecting the Soviet KGB under a new name: the Federal Security Service (FSB). Putin was elected president in 2000, but only after four horrifying attacks—three predawn bombings of Russian apartment buildings and a tragic hostage-taking in a primary school in the city of Beslan—that altogether killed 641 Russian citizens and injured upward of 2,000 more.
In 2017, after two lawsuits by the families and survivors of the Beslan school attack, the European Court of Human Rights found that the weapons used in the military response—which were reported to include “grenade launchers, flame-throwers, and tank cannon”—were clearly excessive and, in a mission intended to rescue hundreds of hostages, extremely counterproductive.
The ruling further stated that “at least several days in advance, the authorities had had sufficiently specific information about a planned terrorist attack in the area” to have prevented it, but they “failed to take measures capable of preventing or minimizing the known risk.” The clear implication is that all four attacks were planned and executed by the FSB and its agents, as a pretext for the Second Chechen War—and for Putin, the “strong leader” waiting in the wings, to be swept into power.
To its credit, Words of War gets this message across. Especially in the final scene, which shows Politkovskaya in an unusually cheerful mood, having just learned that her daughter, Vera, is expecting her first child. Carrying groceries into her apartment building, Politkovskaya calls Sasha, her ex-husband, to share the good news and invite him to join the rest of the family for dinner. Then she steps out of her apartment to retrieve the last grocery bag from the elevator—and is shot three times by a lone assassin. As the killer flees down the stairwell and the elevator doors keep bumping into Politkovskaya’s stretched-out legs, the film ends with the line quoted earlier: “There is nothing of value apart from truth.”
This line has a nice ring, but it seems an odd way to end a film whose truthfulness has been challenged by Politkovskaya’s own family. In May, her son, Ilya, told the Novaya Gazeta Europe that the producers had started work on Words of War without notifying the family, much less consulting them. When the family got wind of the production, they asked to see the screenplay and raised a number of objections. The producers responded by cutting the disputed parts and peremptorily insisting that enough research had been done. After “a long legal correspondence” that “didn’t come to any agreement,” the family disavowed the film, calling it “a fictional story, or rather a number of fictional stories that the screenwriter came up with and cobbled together.”
Storytellers Versus Reporters
There are, to be sure, different kinds of truth. There is the truth of fictional storytelling, which allows artists to modify the everyday facts as they see fit, and cover their keisters with the disclaimer “based on a true story.” This may be why certain real-life details, like the number of assassins (two, possibly three) and shots fired (four), were lowered in the film. But such poetic license does not apply to the truth of journalism, which despite being provisional and subject to correction, permits no such modifications or disclaimers. That is why, in a country with a long tradition of all-powerful autocrats deliberately blurring the line between fiction and fact, Politkovskaya became the kind of journalist who keeps digging and refuses to quit.
Yet Politkovskaya was frequently discouraged. In a 2005 documentary about Zainap Gashaeva, the courageous Chechen woman who provided her with video recordings of criminal acts committed by the Russian military and its Chechen allies, Politkovskaya confessed that she could no longer talk about the war with her fellow Russians, because “[o]ur society finds this information repulsive.” The word “repulsive” may seem puzzling, and for all I know it’s a bad translation. But it also reminds us, if we should need reminding, that when human beings are continually barraged with news reports of gross evils that, however accurate, are not accompanied by some hope that those evils can be mitigated, we are much more likely to reject all news reports, including those that are accurate.
This rejection is now occurring in America, where the lunatic polarization of our media has eroded trust in the rough consensus about everyday facts necessary to democratic politics. But for all the distrust we now feel, America has not yet sunk to the level of Russia, where centuries of autocratic rule have taught people not to believe or disbelieve anything they hear, but rather to appear to believe whatever the rulers tell them to believe.
Seemingly oblivious to this distinction, Words of War comes close to treating journalism as an end in itself, rather than a means to other more valued ends. This is part of a broader tendency among self-referential elites, on the right as well as the left, to prioritize abstract notions of truth over the concrete bonds that hold families, communities, and societies together. Another word for this is “ideology,” meaning a rigid system of ideas that has an answer for every question. On the popular level, the same tendency gives rise to hateful conspiracy theories. When not reversed, these tendencies can lead to the oldest and worst form of government: rule by gangs.
When I queried the veteran journalist and Russia expert David Satter about this challenge, he commented that “the broader problem for Westerners who want to make films about Russia is that they need to enter a different world, where the mentality is that of a mass movement in which, as Ukraine’s President Zelensky has pointed out, individual human beings are just logs on a fire.” Speaking at the Hudson Institute in 2006, shortly after the death of Politkovskaya, he elaborated on the nature of that different world:
The sad reality is that 15 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, the role of the individual in Russia has not changed. He is seen as a means to an end not an end in himself. This is why the lives of the children of Beslan were written off the moment the school was seized, a fact to keep in mind lest we agree to Russian carte blanche in their own “neighborhood” or look again in Putin’s eyes and see something we think resembles a soul.
When Words of War premiered in April, the American actor-director Sean Penn was listed as one of 18 executive producers. That’s a lot of executive producers, but when a credit list is that long, it means that most of the people on it did not executive-produce anything but rather lent their names to either boost the film or be boosted by it. In a May interview with Forbes, Penn praised Words of War as on a par with the 2024 Brazilian film I’m Still Here, about the wrongful arrest, torture, and killing of an opposition politician named Rubens Paiva during the military dictatorship of 1964–1985. I’m Still Here has won several awards, including the 2024 Oscar for Best International Feature Film, and grossed $20 million in Brazil, the biggest box office in that country since the pandemic.
By June, when it was evident that Words of War was not going to enjoy comparable success, Penn gave another interview in which he explained that California Representative Eric Swalwell had pressed him to help “champion” the film by accepting an executive producer credit. In that same interview Penn also clearly distanced himself from the outcome: “I can’t claim any credit at all for the movie.” In other words, “Don’t blame me for this flop.” If this was his opinion all along, then why lend his name? My guess is that out of concern for Ukraine, where he was visiting at the time of the invasion, he decided that any film about Russian wrongdoing was better than no film about it.
Art and politics are not so easily separated, however. To have a political impact commensurate with I’m Still Here, Words of War would need to have a commensurate artistic impact. But it does not. The reasons are sufficiently compelling to be worth a brief comparison.
Coming from a Different Hemisphere
I’m Still Here is based on a 2015 memoir by Marcelo Rubens Paiva, the youngest of five children born to the “disappeared” politician Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello) and his wife Eunice (Fernanda Torres). It is very much a political film, but not the kind that makes its point through didactic speeches straining for eloquence. Instead, the director, Walter Salles, keeps the focus on Torres, the beloved Brazilian actress who in a riveting performance shows Eunice straining every muscle to control her emotions, both as a mother shielding her five children from her own profound grief, and as a citizen unceasingly demanding redress for her family’s profound grievance.
For decades, those demands would be met with maddening obfuscation, first by the dictatorship and then by more-or-less democratic regimes bent on piously memorializing the crimes while refusing to prosecute the criminals. Toward the end, the film jumps to 1996, when the Paiva family were granted a degree of vindication in the form of an official death certificate stating that Rubens died after being tortured in the barracks of the First Army Division in Rio de Janeiro between January 21 and 22, 1971. Surrounded by well-wishers, Eunice holds a small press conference. Then, alone in the family’s São Paulo apartment, she adds the document to a binder full of news clippings, and leafing back through it, pauses on a two-page article titled “De Verdad”—the truth.
Clearly, that article, and the death certificate, were of value to the family. But just as clearly, the truth they reported was a limited good, in service to the greater good of Rubens Paiva being treated as a man, not as a log on a fire (to repeat Zelensky’s phrase). In this context, it makes no sense to say, “There is nothing of value apart from truth.” The truth about Rubens’s fate has value not because the facts are good and lovable in themselves, but because he was good and lovable as a husband, father, and friend. And his murder is more than a travesty of justice; it is a knife cutting out the heart of a family. For his sake and theirs, it is necessary to find out who is to blame.
I realize that to call a husband and father the heart of a family is to violate a myriad of taboos in the ever-so-progressive film culture that dominates North America and Western Europe. If you think I’m exaggerating, try to imagine this culture producing a film in which political resistance takes the form of a large, intact family smiling for the camera in a group photograph. Coming from a different hemisphere, I’m Still Here very tellingly frames its story as a triptych of just such photographs.
The first photo, taken on a summery Christmas Day in Rio de Janeiro, is of the entire Paiz family plus several friends crowded together on the beach in front of their house. And the smiles are as effortless as the breaking of the waves.
The second photo is taken several months after Rubens’s arrest. Two photographers from the mass-circulation magazine Manchete arrive at the Paiz house to take a picture of a family in distress. When Eunice and the five children line up on the front steps, one of them says, “No need to smile.”
“Why not?” says Eunice.
“The editor asked for it.”
“For what?”
“He asks for a photo that’s more…you know, not happy.”
The children start laughing, and Eunice tickles them more by saying, “He wants it sad.”
“No,” says the photographer, “it doesn’t have to be sad. Just…no smiles.”
Amid more laughter, Eunice says decisively, “We’ll smile…Smile!”
And the camera clicks.
The third photo is taken at the end of the film, during a family gathering in 2014. The family now consists of Eunice’s grown children, their spouses and children, and Eunice herself, an 85-year-old suffering from dementia. In a crowd-pleasing touch, the role of Eunice is played by Fernanda Montenegro, the beloved Brazilian actress who is the real-life mother of Fernanda Torres. In Marcelo’s São Paulo apartment, Eunice’s daughters and son share a meal while talking and sifting through boxes of old photographs for Marcelo’s memoir, while she sits in her wheelchair with a faraway look.
But when the TV news starts talking about a government commission having finally brought charges against the five military officers responsible for Rubens Paiva’s murder—three of them now deceased—Eunice’s eyes flicker with life. Noticing this, the family move her wheelchair closer to the TV, where her whole face changes at the sight of Rubens’s face on the screen. The report ends, and once again the family lines up for a photo. Playfully, Marcelo tells them all to stop smiling and look sad. They laugh, and the camera clicks, showing every face, including Eunice’s, wreathed in smiles. Instead of I’m Still Here, a better title for this film might have been We’re Still Here.
Brazilian democracy is struggling right now, with a reckless Supreme Court judge named Alexandre de Moraes waging lawfare against a reckless former president, Jair Bolsonaro. And the flames are being stoked by a United States president who has decided to involve himself by waging lawfare against the judge. Brazil is not the only democracy being consumed in this way. But if the recklessness does not stop soon, the world will contain many fewer smiling families and many more logs on the fire.
