“And grandma – with an ax.” Victor Matizen on propaganda techniques in the film “Sunshine”

“Solntsepek”, according to the credits, was released by the St. Petersburg company Parity-Film, registered at the beginning of February 2021 by a certain Dmitry Zaitsev, not known in the film industry, in cooperation with the also unknown company Aurus. The same company had previously produced the film Tourist, about which they wrote: “a commercial for a group of Russian mercenaries known as PMC Wagner.

Production of both paintings, by data sources of “Meduza”, financed the “Kremlin chef” Yevgeny Prigozhin, whose name is associated with the same PMC. In response to an inquiry, he himself compared the Meduza journalist to a character in the film fighting on the side of Ukraine. “Evgeny Viktorovich has no information whether he financed the shooting of Solntsepek,” the businessman’s press service replied to the publication. – It is known that at a private screening, producer Sergei Shcheglov thanked the “customer” for the idea, constant participation and sponsorship of this picture. We do not know whether this referred to Evgeny Viktorovich. “

After the premiere, “Solntsepёk” was released in online cinemas, and on August 18 was shown on NTV. On the movie website listed 30 cities and fifty cinemas, in which it should be shown, however, on August 24, information about the sessions that took place was not received, and an expert close to the domestic film distribution confidentially told The Insider that there would be no offline distribution “due to the absence of two factors: audience potential and official pressure ”.

The action of this film, supposedly based on real events, is preceded by a vague animated cutscene, in which a bearded old man with a huge bear sitting by a fire in the forest (a hint of Russia clearly unplanned by the authors) fry the heads of a rooster, an eagle and a dove on a spit, and exaggerated laughter sounds. Butt (the picture is poorly edited), a title is given, awkwardly informing that after the coup d’etat on 02/21/2014, mass protests began against the policy of the new regime, which violated the rights and freedoms of the inhabitants of this region, which caused the dispatch of regular troops and “volunteer battalions, more some of whom were criminal elements, marauders and nationalists “who began” mass extermination “and” virtually widespread genocide of the Russian-speaking population. “

Further, with reference to the UN, data are cited that for 6 years “the number of victims has reached 44 thousand,” but it is silent about the fact that these are victims from both sides and that the number of those killed among the victims is about 13 thousand. In other words, Ukraine is declared guilty of all the above-mentioned crimes even before the picture begins.

Then comes the first episode containing the above pattern: cars with “Dobrobatovtsy” drive up to the village, good fellows come out, one of whom immediately shoots a man working in the garden, finishes off the wounded man with a shovel, hits with a rifle butt, rapes and kills his wife, and the second, a young scumbag, off-screen grabs the baby and, as can be seen from the shadows, smashes his head against the wall, while the second couple robbing the neighboring house, killing the owner and mistress along the way. The unmotivated atrocity of enemies is another common place of propaganda pictures, starting with the great “Battleship Potemkin”, where the captain of the ship, having trampled the naval order, orders to cover with a tarpaulin (? troops are sent to shoot the purely peaceful crowd on the Odessa stairs leading to the port.

However, even more the beginning of “Solntsepёk” resembles a line from a song from the Second World War, which was sung by street boys for a long time: “I go into the first house I come across, an old woman and an old man live there. An old woman threw herself at her feet, I shot her in the ear with a rifle butt, I finished off the old man with a boot “, and a child’s teaser of the same age:” A freckled fawn, he killed grandfather with a shovel, and grandma with an ax. ”