Why are all Russian men dressed like petty criminals and all women like prostitutes? Of course they aren’t, but honestly, who hesitated for a moment? Tracks East is the name of an urgently recommended series of reports from Eastern Europe (in the Arte media library), which throws this and a whole pile of other clichés overboard and, that’s the nice thing, in a playful, original and, despite the Ukraine war, mostly even optimistic way .
The Russian photographer and actor Gosha Bergal, for example, has something to say about the petty criminal, Russian: gopnik. He played the gopnik in the cinema, the skinny body in a tracksuit with a vodka bottle and a cigarette in his mouth. He knows that the Gopnik style has inspired Western designers, and he has his own theory as to why the image of the crook, the romanticization of sadness and prefab misery persists so stubbornly: because in pop culture it is one of the very few that the East has not taken over from West.
The episode about the “West” is one of the most original ones anyway Tracks East, because it takes away the renewed attention to the East that has often been promised since the outbreak of the Ukraine war and simply reverses the perspective. The West, as young artists, musicians and journalists describe it, is not an idyllic “shire” and the East is not a “Mordor” like Tolkien’s, and the self-righteousness with which the West treats countries like Ukraine, Poland or the Baltic States as a kind of B version of Europe gets on their nerves a lot.
Olena Karandieieva from the Ukrainian State Ballet dances against grief in Hamburg.
(Photo: Kobalt Productions)
On the other hand, what does the “West” and the “East” mean anyway? Aren’t they just ideological constructions, especially now, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where the “West” is a keenly cultivated enemy image for Russia, while the “East” somehow seems pitiable from a Western perspective and in any case seems different and very alien ? The latter is an impression that develops after the eleven episodes of Tracks East can no longer hold, because the young people who have their say here want nothing more than what young people want all over the world: to be free, to do their thing, to be heard, in short: to live.
Because of course the war in Ukraine shook biographies and destroyed destinies, it is the catastrophe of this young century. But he is not the only thing to tell from the East. That’s why the filmmakers visit the Ukrainian influencer Jerry Heil, who became a “war fluencer” after the Russian attack on her homeland, and Ukrainian refugees who – “Exil Whimsical” – post about German waste separation and bureaucracy. You meet Russian VIP dissidents like the punk band “Pussy Riot” and escaped Russian journalists who report from their work inside the Kremlin propaganda machine. But the series also listens to Armenian musicians returning to Yerevan as part of an Armenian repatriation campaign from the diaspora in the US, or a tour guide of the Soviet operetta republic of Transnistria. This East is colorful and exciting, imaginative and self-confident. Lets go.
“Tracks East”, in the Arte media library.
You can find more series recommendations here.