Nastia Korkia and Vlad Fishez become psychoanalysts in Dreams about Putin, a film of their authorship hosted by the INSTAR Film Festival, whose fifth edition concludes this Sunday. In the film -an excellent contribution to the exclusive domain of animated documentary-, both directors perform before our eyes an immersion in the Russian collective imaginary, just where it is gripped by the totalitarian essence of Vladimir Putin's government. Dreams about Putin is also an X-ray of the sharp malaise that stalks and subdues Russia's conscience.

The film gathers a set of dreams that some Russian citizens had with the president after the invasion of Ukraine; dreams chosen from thousands shared on social networks. But dreams is not the right word, they are more like nightmares; they are dreamlike passages that show how Putin's rule has branched out to the point of riddling even people's minds. The control and surveillance of bodies is no longer enough. Outside the empire of reason, it is in dreams that this daily asphyxia is involuntarily expressed, this fear that defeats all illusions. And it is the terrain where the latent becomes manifest: the contempt and fear provoked by the oligarch. By showing how Putin breaks into the private space of dreams, this film charts the trauma of a society under the effects of authoritarianism. By promoting the publication of these nightmares, the war made many people realize the unusual dimensions that the Russian “czar's” blunders can reach.

One woman dreamed, for example, that she was Putin's wife and lived isolated inside the Kremlin walls, tormented by the presence of hundreds of prisoners locked in the basement, where they were “treated like insects”. Someone else says that, in her dream, she lived in a bunker with her family and the president, who slept with women who acceded to his desires, harassed by fear. A girl says she dreamt of trying to escape from the ruler through the alleys of her neighborhood, while he, omnipresent, appeared in every corner, around every corner... These and other dream stories, much more catastrophic and tragic, seem to be fantasy excesses stimulated by anxiety, panic and disgust. They are, strictly speaking, typical passages of a reality where a group of autocrats has reality at its whim, to the point of administering, in a certain way, even the unconscious of the citizens.

While we listen to these dreamlike stories - narrated with a certain parsimony that, perhaps, embodies people's helplessness in the face of the state of things - we see on screen 3D animations that graphically represent them. These are not strict representations of these testimonies, realistic illustrations of them. They are sketches that stage the narratives while virtually expanding the psychological violence that conditions those same dreams. This 3D animated materialization of the nightmares takes advantage of the graphic keys of the program with which they were generated, Unreal Engine (originally conceived for videogame modeling). And, with such qualities in the background, some expressionist, oneiric, grotesque, unfinished, raw environments unfold... One might think that Nastia Korkia and Vlad Fishez wanted the visual architecture to secrete the unconscious throes of the citizens themselves, devoted to recounting their nightmares.

But Dreams about Putin does not end with the collection of these dreams and their animated representation. The directors insert between the narrations fragments of archival videos where Putin is observed in common, recreational, sporting activities... And it is precisely in the contrast between the animated scenes and the archival images -taken from YouTube- where this film achieves its most eloquent political gesture. These segments draw a close, human, ordinary appearance of the tyrant, although here they are subtly manipulated to exhume the authentic absurd and ridiculous character of his behavior. But when these videos are confronted/contrast with the animated nightmares, the brazenness and obscenity of the oligarch is even more naked. This idyllic life of a Putin who spearfishes in a lake, or climbs a mountain, or entertains himself surrounded by cranes in a vast plain, turns out to be more contrived than the animated images. They are the staging of a heroism, of a sinflictivism, of a state of normality that hides the tragedy experienced by individuals. The satisfied hero fixed by these archival records feeds on the fear unleashed in the citizenry.

Animation is such an eloquent resource not only because of the ingenuity of the iconography developed by Nastia Korkia and Vlad Fishez to flesh out these dreams of Putin, not only because of the visual and figurative verve of these half-baked 3D recreations. The filmmakers have proven, once again, the suitability of animation as a resource for documenting subjectivity. In expressive terms, animation resolves to bear witness to those inaccessible corners of sensibility; in this case, the psychological violence exercised by the figure of the dictator. By contrasting the analogical record of YouTube archives and the plastic artificiality of digital animation, the film reveals the value of the latter to apprehend a truth of totalitarianism that often escapes from the apparent reality that spreads before our eyes.

Dreams about Putin closes with archive footage of the Russian president behind bars, in a courtroom, about to stand trial. The video was also taken from YouTube, where it seems to have circulated as fake news. At the time, perhaps, it could not yet be read as a staging of the repressed desires of that citizenry for whom Putin is a nightmare. Now it is the best culmination for Dreams about Putin, as it projects in the waking world the latent desires of dreams: to eliminate the tyrant and face freedom.