Right from the beginning, as the film opens with a quotation from Bertolt Brecht, ‘It said in the papers this morning that a new era has begun’ it is clear that director Nicola Bellucci’s documentary Grozny Blues, a masterful work about contemporary Chechnya, is fixated with contrasting today’s Chechnya – the Chechnya of Ramzan Kadyrov – with Chechnya’s past.
Four women
At the heart of this documentary are four women, and their dedication to preserving memory. During the first Chechen war, they traversed Grozny with a camera; methodically recording the death and destruction they found around them. Recalling those days, they say they had an agreement that if one of them were killed, the others would continue filming, explaining, ‘It’s not that we didn’t care about our lives. We knew that we had an important job to do.’
Bellucci follows these women today as they continue their work, now documenting abuses of Ramzan Kadyrov’s regime. They meet with families of those abducted and killed by Chechen security services, take down details of the kidnappings, listen to their pain. As one of the protagonists says to a visitor whose child disappeared, ‘We cannot find the culprits and punish them, but maybe there are other ways to help you.’
