Dutch director Oeke Hoogendijk’s exemplary documentary unpacks an utterly fascinating legal and ethical conundrum that’s simultaneously extremely timely and weirdly timeless. At the heart of the story is a collection of precious antiquities, the Crimean treasures of the title, some dating back thousands of years to the time of the Scythians. It couldn’t be a more timely story given how the Russia-Ukraine war heated up in Crimea just this past week with a bomb going off on the Kerch bridge, suggesting Crimea – forcibly seized by the Russians in 2014 – may once again become part of Ukraine. This film offers a microcosm of the whole conflict: a battle over identity, nationalism, sovereignty, language, international law, the sympathies of western nations and the EU. This story’s got the lot, plus some lovely mournful cello music.
So to summarise the story, archaeologists dug up all these treasures at some point and they’ve spent years in various different museums all over Crimea. We’re talking beautiful works made of gold, and some tchotchkes made of less precious material but still priceless because of their provenance, coming from the far east and illustrating how the Silk Road passed right through Crimea. Curator Valentina Mordvintseva, a Crimean Russian-speaker as it happens, made a selection of the peninsula’s best works to loan in 2013 to the Allard Pierson museum in Amsterdam, liaising there with her counterpart Wim Hupperetz. Then in 2014 Russia invaded Crimea, leaving the treasures stranded in Amsterdam. Lyudmila Strokova of the National Museum of the History of Ukraine demanded the treasures should be returned to Kiev given the collection had been Ukrainian when it was loaned out; Mordvintseva and the curators of the various Crimean museums, some of them caught on camera voicing rather unattractive Russian nationalist sentiments, demanded the treasures should be sent back to Crimea. It all ended up getting thrashed out by lawyers in the Dutch courts, with many exciting (if you like procedural law stories) twists and turns, that remain unresolved to this day.
Most of us in the UK and beyond are inclined to take Ukraine’s side when it comes to the war, especially in the face of Russia’s humanitarian atrocities. But this case is nowhere near so cut and dried: as the court case make it clear, both arguments are equally persuasive – and equally suspect at times. Hoogendijk scrupulously avoids loading the deck for any one side. Ultimately, the only people viewers may end up feeling any unconditional sympathy for are the poor archaeologists truffling about in the mud looking for bits of bone and flashes of metal, stoically aware that some day all of us will be dead and buried one way or another, our allegiances and beliefs as inscrutable as the Scythians.
• The Treasures of Crimea is released on 14 October at Bertha DocHouse, London.
