Preparations for war do not begin on the frontlines, or even at military training facilities. No, the narrative is laid out in the media for adults, and even at school for children. It seems unethical, and it is even forbidden outright in advanced Western democratic societies (although a teacher is allowed to intervene when students start expressing extremist or totalitarian worldviews), but it is a common practice in societies with lower democratic standards. Sometimes, the indoctrination is subtler, but in the case of Russia, it is completely obvious and very extreme. We were able to see it in this year’s hit documentary Mr. Nobody Against Putin [+lee también:
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The winner of DOK Leipzig’s German Documentary Competition (see the news), Yulia Lokshina’s Active Vocabulary, deals with the similar experiences of another teacher from Russia who had to leave her country, her position and her family behind in order to seek political asylum abroad. Back in 2022, Maria “Masha” Kalinitschewa was recorded by a student in her small English-language class of four when she shared her thoughts on the war in Ukraine, labelling it unjust and potentially disastrous both for Ukraine and for Russia. The candid mobile-phone recording reached the students’ parents, but also Masha’s colleagues and superiors. Threats were made against her, and she and her mother were even investigated by the FSB for scrawling anti-war graffiti on a wall in their village in the Russian Far East. Masha managed to escape to Germany, where she, with her new class of Berlin kids, wants to make a re-enactment of the incident that forced her to leave her home country.

But this is just one of the plot lines in Lokshina’s self-produced, micro-budget documentary essay laced with a few experimental touches. The Russian-born, German-based filmmaker also narrates her own experiences with the Russian school system and migration to another country at primary-school age, a specific ban that effectively outlawed political indoctrination in West German schools in the 1970s and is still in effect post-reunification, and a seemingly unrelated 2021 incident in which a group of female activists tried to stop a New Moscow construction project in a wooded area close to the Russian capital.

It seems that the topics Lokshina deals with have little in common with each other, apart from creating a consensus that today’s Russia is a totalitarian place where the orders from above show little concern for the ideals of justice, common sense, ecology, and individual and collective well-being. However, the essayist approach allows for these kinds of analogies, loose metaphors and abrupt jumps between topics. The use of JS Bach’s suites as the musical background is effective, as is the simple, hand-held camerawork by Nina Wesemann, while the satellite still photos and archival footage previously obtained by Lokshina herself are deftly edited into the material by the filmmaker and Maya Klar. The standout aspect is, however, the 3D animation by Felix Klee that exposes Russian delusions of grandeur with a model of the “monster school” that is being built in New Moscow, lending it an X-ray-like quality. In the end, Active Vocabulary emerges as an on-point, engaging and thought-provoking documentary.

Active Vocabulary is a German production by Oficina de Objectos Perdidos, which also handles the sales.