The first time Alexander killed in the Battle of Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, he cried for days and days.
The second and third time, he got used to killing.
The fourth, he enjoyed it.
"We impaled women and children and ran over the enemy with our tanks," the veteran of Russia's Chechnya wars says, his face blackened and emaciated, from the huge mountain of garbage that has served as his home for several years. years.
"I was just a killing machine. I left people without their fathers, mothers and children. I am a freak who has exceeded all limits".
Tajikhan, 65, raised eight children and saw five die on "the hill".
"If something bad happens to you, no ambulance will come here," she sighs, overcome by fatigue and grief.
Together with her husband, they worked in a kolkhoz, a Soviet collective farm, until the collapse of the USSR left them jobless.
"When democracy came, there was no more work," she says, clutching pictures of the children she lost.
Today, the 60-year-old and her still-living children roam the dump night and day, filling huge bags of plastic, glass and metal to make a living.
Filmed outside Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, the documentary “The Hill” is being shown this week as part of the ACID selection at the 75th Cannes Film Festival.
A haunting film that exposes the consequences of state violence in Russia and the personal and collective trauma it has caused.
A metaphor for the decadence of the Soviet world, the landfill is a world apart that keeps its inhabitants prisoners of a suspended era.
France 24 spoke with co-directors Lina Tsrimova, from the North Caucasus region, and Denis Gheerbrant, about the film's message and its resonance in the context of the war in Ukraine.
France 24: how did you discover this "hill" and what exactly were you looking for
?
Lina Tsrimova:
I had just finished my thesis in history and I wanted to start a new project on the history of the deportations of the peoples of the Caucasus by Stalin, who were accused of being collaborators, Nazis and traitors to the nation.
I felt a certain urgency to do this work, because with the destruction of memorials there are fewer and fewer places left where you can still find traces of these Stalinist crimes.
So we went to Kyrgyzstan, a place of exile for many peoples punished by Stalin but also a place of refuge for peoples who fled China, like the Uyghurs.
At the start, we had no precise idea, we were just discovering the country.
But when we came across this place, we understood that it embodied the questions we were asking ourselves, about the nature of the state, the end of the great Soviet empire, and the emergence of a new Putinian criminal state.
Denis Gheerbrant:
There is a topography that is symbolically very strong, it's like a stage on which encounters are played out between different populations made up – for the most part – of former kolkhoz workers who have lost their jobs.
It is therefore also a story of an exodus from the countryside to the big cities.
LT:
It's a characteristic of the post-Soviet world, these big cities that are springing up like Bishkek with its endless suburbs, where people live without rights or protection and where migrants of all origins cross paths.
Does the tragic fate of Alexander, this former soldier who committed massacres in the name of the Russian state and now lives on the hill of garbage, illustrate the collapse of the Soviet world
?
LT:
his journey is both a consequence and a premise, a warning for what is happening today.
It stands at the crossroads between the end of the Soviet world and the beginning of a new era.
The wars in Chechnya usher in a new era, the Putin era.
The war in Ukraine had not started, although there had already been Crimea.
But in the Caucasus, since the wars in Chechnya, we have been living in a context of violence with regimes like that of (Ramzan) Kadyrov.
Chechnya has turned into a totalitarian monster, but the other republics are also deprived of freedom.
Of course, the gravity of what is happening in Ukraine today is much greater.
DG:
Lina's thesis was about imperial wars.
In this part of the Caucasus, this corresponds to a century and a half of war.
The Russians came to the conclusion that they would not succeed, that the only way would be to destroy, to empty the territories of their population.
There is still an echo with Ukraine today.
We no longer want to conquer it, we want to destroy it.
Your film portrays the characters with great empathy and sensitivity. How did you approach them
?
DG:
What struck us at the start was their great dignity.
They are in the denunciation of the mafia system, but do not feel sorry for themselves.
Our main concern was to give them back their humanity.
These are excluded people, we wanted them to speak to us in their humanity.
LT:
It was particularly difficult in the case of Alexandre.
I thought he needed to find someone who measured the seriousness of his word.
Finding himself in front of me, whom he considered to be Caucasian, he could say: 'Yes, I exterminated women and children like dogs'.
It was a difficult word for him and for me.
It was only after three weeks that we returned to the subject, and he spoke of its monstrosity.
In a way, he was looking to me for recognition of his humanity.
Once the camera was off, he asked me, looking me in the eye: 'Tell me, could you love someone like me?'.
It was his way of saying, 'I know I'm a monster, but do you recognize me as a human?'
I did not find an answer.
During the screening, you spoke of your feeling of "responsibility" for what is happening in Ukraine. Can you tell us more
?
LT:
What we miss a lot in Russia, and everywhere in the post-Soviet space, is that we haven't done the work of de-Stalinization, we haven't engaged in a deep reflection on the violence of the A state that keeps coming back in history, as with (Vladimir) Putin.
We haven't done our homework on colonial history.
Russia is one of the few empires to have survived the 20th century, so we did not rethink our model and this reflection has now become essential.
The peoples of the Caucasus and all those who have been colonized by Russia have neither space nor voice, they are oppressed by (Vladimir) Putin.
We have two words in Russia, one for ethnic Russians and one for citizenship.
Behind this Russian word, there are all these non-Russian peoples who are oppressed and who unfortunately participate in this war (in Ukraine), and it is an immense pain.
If I feel responsible, it is not in the sense of moral guilt but in the sense of action.
It will be necessary to participate in the reconstruction of independent Ukraine and in the formation of this anti-colonial thought.
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