Renowned Serbian filmmaker Emir Kusturica has lauded RT for covering topics sidelined by other media, and particularly for showing him aspects of life in the US that are glossed over by Hollywood and official narratives.
The director was speaking at an RT international film festival featuring dozens of documentaries on the Ukraine conflict. The event dubbed ‘RT.Doc: The Age of Our Heroes’ kicked off on Friday in the Serbian village of Drvengrad in the west of the country.
The village was originally built by Kusturica as a film set two decades ago and has since become a venue for film and music festivals, as well as a tourist attraction. Speaking at the festival, Kusturica described documentaries as the very essence of television.
“[The] actual idea of television can be found exclusively in documentary programs,” he said, adding that various TV formats like news or other information programs tend to lean towards one side or another when covering certain events. Documentaries, on the other hand, demonstrate “the truth about the meaning of television” and are “every television’s… strongest program.” He explained that the festival provides a chance to see such works.
The filmmaker also specifically praised documentaries produced by RT, saying that they showed him things he had not even thought about, particularly when it comes to the US.
“Thanks to Russia Today, I saw an America that is not just Brad Pitt and George Clooney, but an America that has around 40,000-50,000 people without [a] home, and that’s only California,” Kusturica said. “I got to know the side of America that didn’t exist in my thoughts, yet alone in those films that I loved from the 70s.”
RT covers topics from various parts of the globe, including Europe, the US and Africa, opening “a new view for us in the whole world,” according to the director. He then expressed his hope that Drvengrad would be able to host “another good film festival” in this “most important” genre and thanked the event organizers for choosing the venue.
The festival, which runs through Sunday, features more than 60 documentaries, including those filmed by Russian war correspondents, as well as Italian, French, and US crews. Kusturica made one of them himself. His documentary focuses on Kiev’s persecution of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), which it accuses of having ties to Russia.