Mansky Wins in Karlovy Vary
The winner of the documentary competition at the festival in Karlovy Vary was – no surprise – “Putin’s Witnesses”, which I did not manage to watch while at the Czech festival, that had – according to competent sources – a good documentary section. I take a bite of the review at Cineeuropa, written by Vladan Petkovic:
…With Mansky’s approach, the film might as well have been titled Putin and I, as his closeness to the Russian ruler during that period provides for unprecedented access and remarkable insight. You would be hard pushed to find such intimate and close-up footage of the president in his early days elsewhere. But what Mansky does best here is showing us the reasons for Putin’s popularity and detailing his rise and gradual evolution into the autocrat that he is today. While the president will still essentially remain a mystery to us mere mortals, Mansky’s film brings us much closer to him than, say, Oliver Stone‘s panegyric The Putin Interviews..
