Zurich honours Vitaly Mansky: documenting power, memory and the Russian Empire

Vitaly Mansky (centre) poses with the orchestra of the National Infantry Academy during the shooting of his latest film "Time to the Target". Vitaly Mansky

From Lenin’s body to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Russian-Ukrainian filmmaker Vitaly Mansky has chronicled some of the most dramatic chapters of Soviet and Russian history in his documentaries. The Swiss city of Zurich is showcasing a comprehensive retrospective of his work.

Ukrainian filmmakers have developed their own narrative strategies to document almost four years of the Russian invasion that followed the decade-long conflict in Crimea.

Vitaly Mansky is probably one of those most prolific. His oeuvre is now being honoured in its most comprehensive retrospective to date, curated by Nicole Reinhard, director of the FilmpodiumExternal link, Zurich’s arthouse cinema. 

Mansky’s latest film, Time to The Target (2025), a 179-minute epic observation of his native city of Lviv (western Ukraine), breaks the illusion that distance from the front line offers protection from the war’s suffering. First screened at the Berlinale (Berlin International Film Festival) in February, Time to the Target also became the catalyst for the Zurich retrospective.

The programme brings together ten films, led by Mansky’s recent focus on Ukraine. Since the onset of Russia’s invasion, he has produced the raw and direct Eastern Front (2023), portraying military medics between the trenches and their homes, as well as the short Iron (2024), exploring the recent growth of military equipment in Europe and beyond.

Some people might assume that Mansky is among the leading voices of the current Ukrainian non-fiction movement. Yet this is not entirely accurate: for much of his life Mansky was a Russian citizen until he moved to Latvia in 2014, after signing an open letter in solidarity with Ukrainian filmmakers.

His life story – as a dual Russian and Ukrainian citizen, now listed as “wanted” by the Russian Interior Ministry since 2022 – and his filmography of more than 40 works, are both marked by a deep exploration of identity, nationality, and belonging.

The birth of the auteur

Born in Lviv in 1963, Mansky, like many other Ukrainian-born filmmakers, studied in Moscow – then considered the epicentre of film education. After his debut short documentary Dogs (1986), it took him five years to make a documentary about the main symbols of the crumbling Soviet Union.

Filming in the Kremlin: at the turn of the century, Mansky worked for state TV and had privileged access to Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin and their entourages. Vitaly Mansky

Lenin’s Body is a film about the bizarre phenomenon of the embalmed revolutionary leader, who ruled the country between 1917 and 1924. It questions both the logistics and the symbolism of maintaining this relic. This auspicious debut premiered at Locarno Film Festival in 1991. Since then, Mansky has developed his cinematic signature, skillfully juggling two poles of documentary filmmaking: archive montage and real-life observations.

In his earliest film, Private Chronicles. Monologue (1999), shown in Zurich, Mansky sifted through over 5,000 hours of audiovisual footage and 20,000 stills of hundreds of people’s lives. The result is a fictional collective biography of an average Soviet citizen born in 1961.

The film is a touching and eclectic portrait of life during the final years of communism, where Mansky crafts the collective memory by transforming private material and fragments of domestic life into a historical allegory.

Equally significant is the other side of his work: a fly-on-the-wall style of filmmaking marked by long, observational takes that explore the archetypes of Soviet and post-Soviet landscapes, often featuring elements of constructivist and brutalist architecture.

In Pipeline (2013), for example, the main character is a Trans-Siberian gas pipeline that stretches from western Siberia to western Europe. Over 100 days of filming and 17,000 kilometres of travel, the filmmaker links two geographically and politically disconnected worlds. Devoid of narration or explanatory text, its imagery reflects on the disparity between the miserable living conditions of those who extract and transport the gas versus the comfortable lives of those who consume it in the West.

Access and curiosity

Mansky has a knack for gaining unique access, entering places that most journalists can only dream of. No one has ever got as close on camera to Vladimir Putin as Mansky in Putin’s Witnesses (2018), perhaps the most revealing film ever made about the Russian president.

It is also one of his most personal films, opening with intimate footage of Mansky’s wife and daughters on the celebration of the 1999 New Year. His family is irritated by his obsessive camera, but also anxious as Putin’s era was officially beginning – he became president on December 31, 1999.

At that time, Mansky was working for state television, documenting Putin’s first election campaign. This unprecedented access allowed him to informally film Putin, his entourage, and the family of Boris Yeltsin, his predecessor. Years later, revisiting this footage, Mansky constructed a self-reflective documentary — not just about the origins of the Russian president’s authoritarian power, but also about his own complicity in crafting the mythology of the regime still in place today.

A stylistically different but equally intimate portrait emerges in Gorbachev. Heaven (2020). The last leader of the Soviet Union appears in his home, filmed with quiet dignity and melancholy. Through intense close-ups, we listen as Gorbachev reflects on perestroika (the political reform movement of the 1980s within the Soviet regime) and Lenin, alongside musings on faith and love.

Former Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev at his home, during the shooting of “Gorbachev. Heaven” Vitaly Mansky

On foreign shores

Mansky’s trips show him to be a curious traveller rather than an ethnographic filmmaker, choosing to film in countries whose political patterns are somehow related to Russia’s past and present.

For Patria o muerte (2011), he went to Cuba with an aim to look at a socialist state from the perspective of a citizen still recovering from the failed socialist project in his own homeland. The film offers a lyrical yet brutally honest look at modern Cuban society, dragging itself along the signs of a failed revolution.

But the genuine catharsis of his oeuvre remains his sensational breakthrough into North Korea in Under the Sun (2015). Mansky got permission to film a documentary about a model family in North Korea, where every detail, from the script to camera angles, had to be pre-approved by the country’s propaganda agency. And yet, Mansky risked all to make the film on his own terms.

Secretly, he left the camera rolling when he was supposed to stop, zoomed in on individual faces when he was expected to film parades, and filmed through curtains to bypass surveillance. The film became a shocking revelation of the illusion of normality in one of the world’s most totalitarian states. Under the Sun has since become an important work of non-fiction, studied in universities as a benchmark of documentary cinema’s ability to probe for a deeper truth.

Ukrainian identity

Despite Mansky’s Russia-dominant filmography, two lesser-known works reveal that his connection to Lviv has endured through the decades, concluding an “accidental trilogy”, a prolific and honest ode to his birthplace.

It starts with Gagarin’s Pioneers (2006). Mansky set out across the world to find and interview 33 of his former classmates. Their childhood in Lviv becomes a uniting discussion of what defines a “homeland”.

Ten years later came Close Relations (2016), another personal film born out of the war in Ukraine. Mansky uses his family as a collective metaphor for a divided nation, as his relatives — some from western Ukraine, others from Crimea — are unable to speak with each other without arguing about politics. The family brawls are intercut by scenes of Lviv’s serene Rynok Square.

In Time to The Target, Mansky put the exact same square in focus to present how relentlessly it has been transformed by war, sometimes placing his camera almost at the same spots as in Close Relations. The church that once hosted weddings now conducts endless military funerals; happy tourists are replaced by grieving mothers.

The film’s strict, distanced observation of war is perfectly in tune with the dominant aesthetic of contemporary Ukrainian documentary cinema. Though bound to his peers, Mansky sets a distinct voice by reflecting with calm precision on the themes of identity and homeland as both are fatally targeted by the Russian aggressor.

Funeral of an Ukrainian soldier in a scene from the film “Time to the Target”. Vitaly Mansky

While there are no plans for further travels of the retrospective, almost all of the films mentioned are available for viewing on the director’s personal websiteExternal link.

Edited by Virginie Mangin & Eduardo Simantob/sb