Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic A few days into Russia\u2019s full-scale invasion of his native Ukraine in 2022, film producer Alexander Rodnyansky learnt that Vladimir Putin\u2019s defence minister had personally demanded that he be \u201cexcluded from the Russian cultural agenda\u201d. Rodnyansky, who had loudly denounced the war from his home in Moscow, stuffed a few of his most treasured awards into a suitcase and left for the airport that same day.\u00a0Since then, in between producing films in the west \u2014 Michel Franco\u2019s Dreams, starring Jessica Chastain, premieres this weekend at the Berlin Film Festival \u2014 Rodnyansky has spent the war\u2019s three years re-examining his own work in Russia and the dark path the country has taken under Putin. \u201cFilm and TV share a significant part of the responsibility [for the war],\u201d Rodnyansky says. \u201cThey built a world view for Russians who started sympathising with fake heroes more than real people.\u201dRodnyansky, 63, has just published a book, Loveless, reappraising nine films he produced in Russia during the first two decades of Putin\u2019s rule. The book uses them to explore the cynicism, resentment, paranoia and indifference in Russian society that, Rodnyansky now realises, helped lay the groundwork for the war. It takes its title from Andrei Zvyagintsev\u2019s 2017 Oscar nominee, produced by Rodnyansky, an indictment of how Moscow\u2019s commercialist glitz had blinded Russians to the horrors already unfolding in Ukraine and nurtured a callous emptiness inside themselves.\u00a0\u201cWhat we didn\u2019t understand was that being part of that [Moscow] scene meant accepting the logic of those in power,\u201d Rodnyansky says. \u201cThe people who accepted that were smarter than us, because they knew they were selling out.\u201dRodnyansky moved to Moscow in 2002, when rising oil prices had begun to fuel a newly\u00a0resurgent Russia under Putin, to head up entertainment network CTC. A return now seems impossible: his anti-war statements have earned him an eight-and-a-half year prison sentence in absentia in Russia, where he was convicted last October of \u201cpolitical hatred\u201d and spreading \u201cfake news\u201d about the Russian army. In the 2000s, however, Rodnyansky paradoxically saw Russia as a safer place to work than Ukraine \u2014 where news coverage at 1+1, the channel he co-owned, was under constant political pressure from the Moscow-friendly oligarchical regime then in power.CTC\u2019s young, upwardly mobile audience, on the other hand, was sick of the constant mudslinging between oligarchs that dominated Russian TV in the 1990s. The channel\u2019s mostly western investors were eager to make money under Putin\u2019s flourishing new regime and wholeheartedly agreed. \u201cThe Russian audience didn\u2019t want anything to do with politics and kept well away from it,\u201d Rodnyansky says. \u201cWe gave them the hits.\u201dBack then \u20189th Company\u2019 was an anti-war film . . . it looks totally different now \u2014 a movie about \u2018our boys\u2019 . . . That cultural code justifies the war, even if we didn\u2019t think so\u2019Rodnyansky\u2019s first Russian blockbuster was 9th Company (2005), a Band of Brothers-style account of a Soviet army unit fighting in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Shot in Crimea with tanks borrowed from the Ukrainian army, the film offered viewers in both Russia and Ukraine a nostalgic look at a recent past in which they lived in one country and fought alongside each other.\u00a0At one point during filming, Rodnyansky told director Fyodor Bondarchuk they could either make a domestic hit or an international festival darling. To achieve the latter, however, would require a scene depicting \u201cour boys\u201d killing some of the estimated 1.5mn Afghan civilians who died during the Soviet invasion. Bondarchuk, who Rodnyansky thought could become Russia\u2019s answer to Michael Bay, said no. Largely ignored outside the former USSR, 9th Company drew a 40-minute ovation from Russian Afghan war veterans, and an approving review from Putin after the Kremlin screened it for him at his residence.\u201cBack then it was an anti-war film about the end of the Soviet era and the unjustified, awful war in Afghanistan.\u201d But its depictions of camaraderie mean \u201cit looks totally different now \u2014 a movie about \u2018our boys\u2019,\u201d Rodnyansky says. \u201cThe state is bad, the generals have sent them off and forgotten about them, but they are fighting for each other. That cultural code justifies the war, even if we didn\u2019t think so.\u201dBy this point, Ukraine\u2019s Orange revolution a year earlier had put Rodnyansky in an awkward position with the Kremlin. During protests against a Russia-backed candidate\u2019s fraudulent victory, Rodnyansky had apologised on air to 1+1\u2019s viewers for complying with official censorship. He was pointedly not invited to Putin\u2019s screening of 9th Company and pushed out of CTC in 2008 after, he says, Russia\u2019s top ally in Ukraine complained about him to presidential stand-in Dmitry Medvedev.But the public\u2019s appetite for hits was only stronger. Stalingrad, a second world war popcorn flick filmed in 3D, broke box office records in 2013. The head of Imax attended its Moscow premiere alongside the likes of Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov and Kremlin political impresario Vladislav Surkov, who kept a close eye over Russia\u2019s cultural scene \u2014 and wrote fiction under a pseudonym in his spare time.And Rodnyansky was still convinced that Russia was moving in the right direction. \u201cI could see a lot of young, middle-class people who studied abroad, worked for us, voted for us and went to protests. Eventually, I thought, there\u2019d be generational change and it\u2019d become a normal country.\u201d\u00a0He saw that generation reflected in the audience for Zvyagintsev\u2019s films, which offered scathing critiques of Russia\u2019s pervasive corruption and moral degradation. Loveless juxtaposes the volunteers helping search for a lost boy with the emptiness of his parents, who are shown, years after the search has been abandoned, casually watching state television propaganda about Ukraine.But playing the game required increasingly uneasy compromises. After Zvyagintsev\u2019s 2014 Oscar nominee Leviathan faced a hail of Kremlin criticism for its depictions of corruption and the church, state television asked Rodnyansky to make amends. Ukraine \u2018needs to explain to Trump voters why they should support us. Talking about how we\u2019re suffering for your values . . . doesn\u2019t work on isolationists\u2019Atonement meant producing a series based on an early modern history book that Russian culture minister Vladimir Medinsky \u2014 Leviathan\u2019s loudest critic \u2014 had written for young adults. Leviathan\u2019s star Aleksei Serebryakov accepted the lead as a way to get off a blacklist for having said that Russia\u2019s national idea was \u201cforce, impudence and boorishness\u201d. The resulting series was so bad that Medinsky tried to take his name out of the credits. \u201cI knew the rules of the game,\u201d Rodnyansky writes. \u201cEveryone involved tried to forget about it as quickly as possible.\u201dThe invasion made compromises like that impossible for Rodnyansky and several other actors and directors, such as Zvyagintsev, who have criticised the war and left Russia. (The director is shooting a new film, Jupiter, from exile, though not produced by Rodnyansky.)But many of his former collaborators have found ways to make peace with Putin\u2019s invasion, Rodnyansky says. One of 9th Company\u2019s stars, Soslan Fidarov, even fought in Ukraine. \u201cAt some point you either realise what you were doing is wrong and you stop conforming, or you deliberately look for ways to live with it. You get back up, talk yourself into it and go on living.\u201dAny illusions Rodnyansky had fell in the early hours of the war, when his son \u2014 an economic adviser to Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine\u2019s president \u2014 called him as Russian air strikes rained down on Kyiv. That same day, the head of Zelenskyy\u2019s office asked Rodnyansky if he knew any members of the Russian elite who could convince Putin to end the war. Rodnyansky put the Ukrainians in touch with former Chelsea FC owner Roman Abramovich, who emerged as an important go-between in peace talks that spring. Russia\u2019s delegation was headed up by Medinsky, as if to underscore the outsized role that history and culture play in Putin\u2019s invasion.Many Ukrainians believe the kind of Russian historical revanchism preached by Medinsky are the real driving force for the war \u2014 leaving all Russians with a share of guilt. Rodnyansky, however, has rallied support for exiled Russian artists, and cannot bring himself to criticise the likes of Bondarchuk, who has been notably silent about the invasion. \u201cFor a lot of Ukrainians, it\u2019s a war between Ukrainians and Russians. But for me it\u2019s a war between freedom and totalitarianism.\u201dRodnyansky also points to the dwindling star of Zelenskyy, who spellbound the west with his defiant leadership in the early phases of the war, but has struggled to rally support \u2014 particularly from the US \u2014 as it drags on. \u201cWords have a way of losing their value and things that used to work perfectly stop working at all,\u201d he says.\u00a0He thinks Donald Trump\u2019s re-election has opened a window of opportunity for peace, but warns that Ukraine will probably have to make painful concessions.\u00a0Ukraine \u201cneeds to explain to Trump voters why they should support them,\u201d he says. \u201cTalking about how we\u2019re suffering for your values and are all in it together doesn\u2019t work on isolationists . . . At the start people wondered how to go on living when Europe is facing aggression in violation of all international law, norms, standards, and guarantees. And now everyone\u2019s used to it. This is just how we live now.\u201dMax Seddon is the FT\u2019s Moscow bureau chiefFind out about our latest stories first \u2014 follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic A few days into Russia\u2019s full-scale invasion of his native Ukraine in 2022, film producer Alexander Rodnyansky learnt that Vladimir Putin\u2019s defence minister had personally demanded that he be \u201cexcluded from the Russian cultural agenda\u201d. Rodnyansky, who had loudly denounced the war from his<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":207283,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-207282","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207282","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=207282"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207282\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":207284,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207282\/revisions\/207284"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/207283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=207282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=207282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=207282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}