Mixing live action and animation, Ilze Burkovska Jacobsen directs her first feature film, My Favorite War, which comes out Wednesday, April 20. She retraces her childhood in Latvia in the 1970s under Soviet influence. A film that resonates strongly today with the war in Ukraine, where propagandist speeches have a lot to do with the conflict.
In 1977, Ilze is a child who engages in responsibilities of her age, as leader of the pioneers of the Latvian communist youth. The older she grows, the more Ilze develops a critical view of the Soviet authoritarian regime in her country, up to Perestroika which will liberate people’s minds and the country.
Surprising to note the synchronicity between the current Russian-Ukrainian conflict and the exit from My Favorite War. The connection lies in the content of the Soviet propagandist discourse articulated around the victory against Nazism in 1944, during the Cold War, today reused by Vladimir Putin to justify his invasion of Ukraine. An anachronistic and manipulative ideological constant, conceived by a president, ex-executive of the KGB during the Cold War.
Ilze Burkovska Jacobsen starts from amateur family films to introduce her story, her own story. This intimacy touches immediately and is transposed in the animation with the charm of a graphic design linked to childhood, but also to the meaning of the story. Thus, all his characters, adults and children, have large black eyes, as if blocked, blackened, blinded by official speech. The evocation of propaganda takes the form of graphic montages that refer to pop art by denouncing the big tricks of authoritarian power.
The drama lies in the evolution of Ilze who, a fervent young communist, gradually questions the difference between the glorifying discourse of power and reality. Food restrictions contradict him, and his relatives get information through channels that undermine the official media. My Favorite War raises specific stories that touch the universal, in an original, relevant and aesthetic form.
Genre : Animation, biopic
Director : Ilze Burkovska Jacobsen
Pays : Latvia, Norway
Duration : 1h22
Sortie : 20 avril 2022
Distributer : Destiny Films
Synopsis : In the 1970s, Latvia was a Soviet Socialist Republic. Ilze, the director, tells us about her childhood in the middle of the Cold War, under a powerful authoritarian regime. At first a fervent communist, she somehow sharpens her critical spirit in the face of national indoctrination. But it was adolescence that finally allowed him to conquer true freedom of thought!