The Search | |
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Directed by | Michel Hazanavicius |
Written by | Michel Hazanavicius |
Produced by | Michel Hazanavicius Thomas Langmann |
Starring | Bérénice Bejo Annette Bening |
Cinematography | Guillaume Schiffman |
Edited by | Anne-Sophie Bion Michel Hazanavicius |
Music by | Selim Azzazi |
Production companies | La Petite Reine Worldview Entertainment La Classe Américaine Georgian Film Investment Group Sarke Studio |
Distributed by | Warner Bros. Pictures |
Release dates |
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Running time | 160 minutes |
Countries | France Georgia [1] |
Languages | English French Russian Chechen [2] |
Box office | $600,000 [3] |
The Search is a 2014 French drama film written and directed by Michel Hazanavicius and produced by Hazanavicius and Thomas Langmann. The film was inspired by the Oscar-winning post-Holocaust drama also called The Search , [4] directed by Fred Zinnemann, in which a compassionate westerner helps a lost child find what is left of his family amidst the chaotic flood of post-war civilian refugees. In the 1948 film, the backdrop is post-war Berlin; The Search (2014) takes place in the "front lines of the Russian invasion of Chechnya" [5] during the first year of the Second Chechen War (1999–2009). [6] [7] The Search was selected to compete for the Palme d'Or in the main competition section at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival. [8]
The film begins and ends on 16 October 1999, [9] with 20-year-old Kolia, (Maksim Emelyanov), a Russian Army recruit, recording and narrating with a handheld video camera, as young, drunken Russian soldiers taunt, terrorize, and finally execute a civilian Chechen couple in front of their teenage daughter Raissa (Zukhra Duishvili). [10] Kolia's story is one of four personal narratives that unfold against the backdrop of the ruins of a village in Chechnya, the flood of civilian refugees from the village, and a family partially reunited. Kolia, a pot-smoking guitar player in Perm, 2,300 kilometers from the Chechen border, is taken into custody for possession of drugs and drafted into army service. As a new recruit, he undergoes a brutal transformation from an innocent youth into a "dehumanized killing machine." [5] When Kolia's fellow soldiers kill the Chechen couple, the couple's nine-year-old son, Hadji (Abdul Khalim Mamutsiev) hides and watches and when it is safe, he is able to carry his infant brother to relative safety. The trauma of his parents' death renders him mute. He is helped along the way to the refugee camp by other Chechen refugees and eventually, he is befriended by Carole (Bérénice Bejo), a French-born, Chechnya-based NGO worker. Carole, who works as a researcher and representative of the Human Rights Committee of the European Union, helps Hadji regain his ability to speak. Hadji's elder sister Raïssa searches for both brothers. Carol interviews Helen (Annette Bening), a Red Cross worker, and places hope in the International response to the Second Chechen War to help the centuries-old struggle of the Chechen people. [11] Raissa, reunited with her baby brother, escapes once again from the village with the help of other Chechen refugees. She has to leave without Hadji, against her will, because of the Russian military forces' aerial bombing. [12] Raissa helps Helen at the International Red Cross orphanage. Both Helen and Carole are discouraged when the United Nations Commission of Human Rights report of April 2000 does not declare the situation in Chechnya a humanitarian disaster. [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] Carole delivers her report to the United Nations but soon realizes that not many of the participants are listening. With the help of Carole and Helen, [10] Hadji is reunited with his siblings. The film ends at the beginning, with Kolia's filming of the attack on Hadji's family.
Much of the filming took place alongside the Caucasus Mountains in Georgia, depicting places like a village near Grozny, NGO offices in the city of Nazran in nearby Ingushetia, a federal subject of Russia that borders Chechnya, the city of Perm, Russia. [18] [19] Film critic Justin Chang praised the work of set designer, Emile Ghigo, who used buildings, places, and geographical features in the "mountainous, battle-scarred landscape" of Georgia that were similar to those in Chechnya including buildings destroyed by bombs, army barracks and refugee camps. [5] McCarthy also cited Ghigo's contribution with his "well-chosen locations, the crowded city scenes, detention centers and army barracks reek with the feel, sounds and discomfort of humanity pressed into unnaturally tight quarters." [20]
Critics praised the work of Guillaume Schiffman, [5] [20] the French cinematographer, who also worked with director Michel Hazanavicius on films such as The Artist . [21] McCarthy described how they used "muted but still sharply defined colors, as well as with what appear to be mostly handheld cameras, to achieve a somber yet vitally immediate look." [20]
On film review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, critics gave The Search a rating of 21%, based on 19 reviews, with a weighted average score of 4.71/10. [22] On Metacritic, the film has a score of 37 out of 100, based on 8 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews". [23] The Guardian journalist Peter Bradshaw argued that Hazanavicius' attempt at "Old Hollywood big-hearted sincerity" devolved from an earnest rejection of violence against all actors in a war, into naive sentimentality. [10] Bradshaw did commend Hazanavicius for reminding the west and the European Union of their lack of concern and inaction when Boris Yeltsin attacked Chechenya. [10] Chang also praised all the actors for turning "in fine work within fairly circumscribed parameters;" he described the production as "first-rate" and the sound work as excellent. However, he called the film a "grueling, lumbering, two-and-a-half-hour humanitarian tract that all but collapses under the weight of its own moral indignation" with an approach that was "ultimately hectoring" and "didactic." [5] The Globe and Mail critic Liam Lacey described the film as "long, unoriginal and heavy-handed", a direct opposite of Hazanavicius' Oscar-winning silent movie comedy, The Artist. [24] Critic Todd McCarthy observed that the Chechen faction to which the Russians were responding — referred to as rebels, terrorists or invaders elsewhere — are conspicuously absent from the film's mosaic. McCarthy remarked that, "it might have behooved [the film maker] to have everyday Chechens as well as the foreigners reference them, positively or negatively, to at least make them a presence and a factor in the tragedy." [20]
In 2015, a fictional sequence taken from the film was presented as a real video of a massacre taken by a Russian soldier during the 1999 Chechnya war. In 2022, the same fictional sequence was posted on social networks, this time supposedly as an example of a massacre committed by Ukrainian soldiers during the Chechen war (even though - paradoxically - the Ukrainian army never fought in Chechnya). [25]
Chechnya, officially the Chechen Republic, is a republic of Russia. It is situated in the North Caucasus of Eastern Europe, between the Caspian Sea and Black Sea. The republic forms a part of the North Caucasian Federal District, and shares land borders with Georgia to its south; with the Russian republics of Dagestan, Ingushetia, and North Ossetia–Alania to its east, north, and west; and with Stavropol Krai to its northwest.
The First Chechen War, also referred to as the First Russo-Chechen War, was a struggle for independence waged by the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria against the Russian Federation from 11 December 1994 to 31 August 1996. This conflict was preceded by the battle of Grozny in November 1994, during which Russia covertly sought to overthrow the new Chechen government. Following the intense Battle of Grozny in 1994–1995, which concluded with a victory for the Russian federal forces, Russia's subsequent efforts to establish control over the remaining lowlands and mountainous regions of Chechnya were met with fierce resistance and frequent surprise raids by Chechen guerrillas. The recapture of Grozny in 1996 played a part in the Khasavyurt Accord (ceasefire), and the signing of the 1997 Russia–Chechnya Peace Treaty.
The Second Chechen War took place in Chechnya and the border regions of the North Caucasus between the Russian Federation and the breakaway Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, from August 1999 to April 2009.
Ramzan Akhmatovich Kadyrov is a Russian politician and current Head of the Chechen Republic. He was formerly affiliated with the Chechen independence movement, through his father who was the separatist-appointed mufti of Chechnya. He is a colonel general in the Russian military.
Abdul-Halim Abusalamovich Sadulayev was the fourth President of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria. Sadulayev served little more than a full year as President before being killed in a gun battle with FSB and pro-Russian Chechen forces.
During the inter-ethnic strife in Chechnya and the First and Second Chechen Wars for independence hundreds of thousands of Chechen refugees have left their homes and left the republic for elsewhere in Russia and abroad.
The Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, known simply as Ichkeria, and also known as Chechnya, was a de facto state that controlled most of the former Checheno-Ingush ASSR from 1991 to 2000 and has been a government-in-exile since.
In Chechnya, mass graves containing hundreds of corpses have been uncovered since the beginning of the Chechen wars in 1994. As of June 2008, there were 57 registered locations of mass graves in Chechnya. According to Amnesty International, thousands may be buried in unmarked graves including up to 5,000 civilians who disappeared since the beginning of the Second Chechen War in 1999. In 2008, the largest mass grave found to date was uncovered in Grozny, containing some 800 bodies from the First Chechen War in 1995. Russia's general policy to the Chechen mass graves is to not exhume them.
Human rights violations were committed by the warring sides during the second war in Chechnya. Both Russian officials and Chechen rebels have been regularly and repeatedly accused of committing war crimes including kidnapping, torture, murder, hostage taking, looting, rape, decapitation, and assorted other breaches of the law of war. International and humanitarian organizations, including the Council of Europe and Amnesty International, have criticized both sides of the conflict for blatant and sustained violations of international humanitarian law.
Russia incurred much international criticism for its conduct during the Second Chechen War, which started in 1999. The governments of the United States and other countries condemned deaths and expulsions among civilians. The United Nations Commission on Human Rights (UNHCR) passed two resolutions in 2000 and 2001 condemning human rights violations in Chechnya and requiring Russia to set up an independent national commission of inquiry to investigate the matter. However, a third resolution on these lines failed in 2004. The Council of Europe in multiple resolutions and statements between 2003 and 2007 called on Russia to cease human rights violations. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) between 2005 and 2007 conducted legal cases brought by Chechens against the Russian government, and in many of these cases held Russia responsible for deaths, disappearances and torture.
The Battle of Grozny of August 1996, also known as Operation Jihad or Operation Zero Option, when Chechen fighters regained and then kept control of Chechnya's capital Grozny in a surprise raid. The Russian Federation had conquered the city in a previous battle for Grozny that ended in February 1995 and subsequently posted a large garrison of federal and republican Ministry of the Interior (MVD) troops in the city.
The reported bombing of Katyr-Yurt (Chechnya) occurred on February 4, 2000, when Russian forces bombed the village of Katyr-Yurt and afterwards a refugee convoy under white flags. The village was also previously bombed by the Russians in 1995 and in 1996.
The Grozny ballistic missile attack was a wave of Russian ballistic missile strikes on the Chechen capital Grozny on October 21, 1999, early in the Second Chechen War. The attack killed at least 118 people according to initial reports, mostly civilians, or at least 137 immediate dead according to the HALO Trust count. Hundreds of people were also injured, many of whom later died.
Estimates of casualties in the Second Chechen War vary wildly, from 25,000 to 200,000 civilian dead plus 8,000 to 40,000 Russian military.
The Borozdinovskaya operation was a zachistka-type operation by Russian forces in Borozdinovskaya, Chechnya, on June 4, 2005, during the Second Chechen War. Members of the Special Battalion Vostok, an ethnic Chechen Spetsnaz unit of the Russian GRU, killed or disappeared 12 people in the ethnic minority Avar village of Borozdinovskaya, near the border with the Dagestan. Representatives of the Russian federal authorities expressed outrage over the incident, and the commander of the unit responsible was convicted.
Khozh-Akhmed Bersanov was a Chechen ethnographer and author noted for his efforts to preserve Chechen culture throughout the 20th century. Bersanov served as the head of the Chechen-Ingush Ministry of Culture for nearly forty years, and his prolific writings edified moral responsibility and ethics in Chechen culture.
Viktor Alekseyevich Popkov was a Russian dissident, Christian, humanitarian, human rights activist and journalist.
Michel Hazanavicius is a French film director, screenwriter, editor, and producer. He is best known for his 2011 film, The Artist, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture at the 84th Academy Awards. It also won him the Academy Award for Best Director. He also directed spy film parodies OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies (2006) and OSS 117: Lost in Rio (2009).
Welcome to Chechnya is a 2020 documentary film by American reporter, author and documentarian David France. The film centers on the anti-gay purges in Chechnya of the late 2010s, filming LGBT Chechen refugees using hidden cameras as they made their way out of Russia through a network of safehouses aided by activists.
The Chechen Republic, commonly known as Chechnya, is a federal republic of Russia that has been noted in several roles during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Kadyrovite forces have fought alongside the Russian forces, while several Chechen armed volunteer formations are fighting on the Ukrainian side. International observers have noted a number of comparisons between the invasion and the First and Second Chechen Wars.