The Guardian’s obituary on Anna Politkovskaya, the anti-Putin journalist whose murder in 2006 shocked the world, has inspired a British film-maker to make a movie about her.
As Miriam Segal reached the end of the article, she felt compelled to make a film about a seemingly “normal woman who literally couldn’t turn away”, who “braved the Chechen killing fields and put her own life in jeopardy to expose Russian state corruption”.
She said: “At a historical moment when freedom of the press was being curtailed in Russia, Anna endured detainments, beatings and death threats in order to expose the truth about atrocities during the Chechnyan genocide.”
The obituary had paid tribute to Politkovskaya’s bravery. It read: “She had been locked in a hole in the ground by Russian troops and threatened with rape, kidnapped and poisoned by the FSB on the first flight to Rostov after the Beslan school siege in 2004.
“She had acted as a negotiator in the Dubrovka theatre siege in Moscow in 2002, when 129 people died after the special services released gas into the building … But she always came back for more, even at personal cost.”
Segal, whose own father, Ronald, was a South African anti-apartheid activist, writer and editor, told the Guardian that she wanted to pay tribute to Politkovskaya as one of so many journalists who had sacrificed their lives. “Since 1992, nearly 2,000 journalists throughout the world have been killed in the line of duty. That alone is a story that should be told because we need journalists telling stories like this,” she said.
Politkovskaya reported for the Russian paper Novaya Gazeta and, occasionally, the Guardian, writing of the Russian president: “If you want to go on working as a journalist, it’s total servility to [Vladimir] Putin. Otherwise, it can be death, the bullet, poison, or trial.”
The film, with the working title Anna, has been written by Eric Poppen, who has been inspired by Politkovskaya’s published words. In one scene, her character says of serious journalists: “You’ll be despised. People will call you names and spit on you and curse your profession. Others will wish harm on you, or worse, want you dead. That is, if you do your job well. If you don’t, they’ll ignore you. And they’d be right to, because there’s nothing more worthless than a journalist who’s bad at their job. Then you’ll despise yourself.”
The film is shooting this month with Maxine Peake, the Bafta-nominated actor, in the title role. She said: “As the far right rises and regimes become even more aggressive to dissenting voices, when over 2,000 journalists have been killed in the line of duty in the last 20 years … there is a great significance in making films like ours.
“Change is not always about mass movements or large revolutions, but about individuals who push back against the oppressors.”
Michael Evans, the author of the spy novel Shadow Lives, about a Russian assassination unit in London, said: “A film depicting Anna Politkovskaya’s courage and dogged determination to expose the brutality of Russian forces in the war in Chechnya could not be more timely when Putin’s troops are being accused of committing similar atrocities in Ukraine.”
The film was planned before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. James Strong, the film’s director, a Bafta and Emmy award-winning film-maker whose productions include Broadchurch and Vanity Fair, said: “Often we use history to illuminate the present … Her biggest achievement was to tell the world of what was happening in Chechnya. It was only when her reporting was picked up by various western press agencies, including the Guardian, that there was an awareness of what was going on.”
Filming is taking place in Latvia. Strong said: “The architecture of Riga is very close to [that] of Moscow. We can’t film in Russia. Initially, Miriam talked about filming in Ukraine. Obviously that’s not an option. Riga also has a rural area which is a good match for Chechnya.”
The film is produced by Segal’s company, Good Films Collective – whose previous productions include the true-crime thriller The Infiltrator – and Rolling Pictures, whose movies include As They Made Us with Oscar-winner Dustin Hoffman.
