BUDAPEST (dpa) – For generations television viewers in Central and Eastern Europe were fed with official versions of history, news, and the events of daily life.
Today, some regional television broadcasters are taking a critical view of past programming and have also started to make documentaries and TV series that tackle the sometimes difficult and less-reported realities of today.“For many years we were shown events presented as history, whereas in reality, it was a kind of a fiction,” said Julia Filimonova, Sales Manager at Russia’s public broadcaster RTR Russian Broadcasting Corporation (RTR), which has an office in Budapest.“Now we are producing programming that tries to reveal the truth, and not the kinds of beautified stories that were presented to the Soviet people,” She added.Since the systemic changes of more than a decade ago this kind of revised history of the Soviet past has been left mainly to western broadcasters. Now, RTR has entered the fray, selling programmes to international markets. Broadcasters like RTR also want to cash in on the huge quantity of Soviet-era film archive footage that they own.“The Russians have come to realise that since they know their subjects best, they are best placed to get value out of their archives,” said Patrick Jucaud, General Manager of Key3Media East, organisers of the DISCOP 2001 television market. “Now they are producing their own documentaries.”One of the documentaries that Filimonova is trying to sell to international broadcasters is called “Cinematic Falsehoods of the 20th Century”. It analyses how the filmed events that inspired millions of citizens of Soviet Russia were in fact carefully staged re-enactments just for the camera.The launch into space of Russia’s first astronaut Yuri Gagarin, the first nuclear tests in the USSR and the raising of the Soviet flag over the Kremlin are only some of the sequences that the film unmasks as the re-creations of skilled directors and cameramen.Other projects focus on the challenges of everyday life in contemporary Russia, like the action series “Cobra”, based on crime fighters at the Moscow tax police who struggle not to become enmired in corruption themselves. “Drug Addiction Russian Style” depicts the lives of a young drug-addict couple, and their attempts to kick the habit.In Croatia, state broadcaster HRT Croatian Television is also creating programming that deals with the country’s troubled recent history. The state broadcaster produced “How the war began on my island”, a film which takes place at the time of the break-up of Yugoslavia in a Serbian outpost on a tiny island on the Adriatic Sea.The protagonist desperately tries to get his son out of a barracks after he is drafted into the army. Meanwhile an American-Polish filmmaker Lech Kowalski, has returned to Poland and is now filming “Invasion”, a documentary about a road built by slave-labourers from Nazi concentration camps.Kowalski’s recent film “The Boot Factory” follows a group of young Polish punk rockers in Krakow, Poland. The director went around with the group for a year, documenting at a respectful and sensitive distance their drunken parties, marriages, drug addictions and the operations of their small boot-making business.The film, which has been aired by the German-French broadcaster Arte, has not yet been bought for screening in Poland. Its Paris- based distributor believes Polish audiences are not yet ready to see the country’s “underground realities”.
