Presented in Panorama Dokumente at the 76th Berlinale

Presented in Panorama Dokumente at the 76th Berlinale, “A Russian Winter“ is the new documentary by Austrian-French director Patrick Chiha.

Following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, many people in Russia faced a stark choice: military service, prison or exile. The film follows Margarita, Yuri and their friends, young Russians who refused to comply with the regime and left their country in search of a new home. They no longer have a place to which they can return, nor one where they feel truly welcome.

The genesis: faces on a screen

The starting point for the film was a specific image, one that many of us saw in September 2022: streams of men fleeing Russia through the Georgian mountains, on foot, by bike, by car, escaping the military mobilisation ordered by the Kremlin. For Patrick Chiha, those faces carried something urgent and unresolved.

“I had the feeling that these faces tell us something about our world, the dangers, the violence” he recalls. “And I had the feeling that the stories of these Russians could tell us something about our life right now and our questions in the western world also. What can we do? Maybe one day we too will have to flee. What is our power? How can we resist?”

Exile as a frozen time

“A Russian Winter” is, at its core, a portrait of exile, but not exile as movement. What Patrick Chiha captures is the opposite: a profound stillness, a suspension. His subjects left Moscow, left their identities, left their lives, the artistic jobs, the parties, the lovers, the normalcy and arrived in Istanbul, Paris, London, Rome. Places that are not really places for them. “They have no more past and no future” says Patrick Chiha. “There is this feeling of being in a permanent present, in a no space.”

It is this frozen quality that gives the film its title. A Russian winter: not cold exactly, but stuck. Immobile. Suspended between a past that cannot be reclaimed and a future that has not yet taken shape.

Empathy without judgement

Patrick Chiha‘s camera stays close to his subjects, close enough to feel their uncertainty, their melancholy, their guilt, but never close enough to judge. It is a balance he has developed over years of filmmaking, and one he describes as inseparable from his own process of inquiry. “I do films because there’s something I don’t understand” he says. “I don’t have the answer. And if the people I film feel that I don’t have the answer, they also start to question.” The film becomes, in this way, not a statement but a space — for reflection, for the audience as much as for the subjects themselves.

This is particularly important given who these people are: Russians, in the eyes of a world that holds Russia responsible for the war in Ukraine. Patrick Chiha is acutely aware of that tension. His subjects have Ukrainian friends, feel shame and guilt, are divided among themselves. But he refuses to reduce them to a political symbol: “I don’t think like this when I make a film. I try not to judge things.”

Finding Margarita

The film’s central character, Margarita, was found almost by chance, through friends, during three weeks in Istanbul funded by a small development grant. She had worked in cinema in Moscow, and day by day Patrick Chiha understood she would become the main character. “She has something very special, her sensitivity, her intelligence, her emotion.” She introduced him to her group of friends, and the film grew from there. As Patrick Chiha puts it, it is always mysterious, like meeting people in life, a process of trust built moment by moment.