OUR NEW PRESIDENT

“The era of independent, unbiased journalism is over,” says Dmitry Kiselyov, head of Russia Today, in a speech to his employees. This sentence is programmatic for Maxim Pozdorovkin’s highly subjective collage. Bizarre news items about Hillary Clinton’s health alternate with hymns of praise for Donald Trump. The director uses Russian reporting on the US-American presidential election to trace the information policy of the Russian state television agency. Clips from news shows are combined with absurd and scary YouTube found footage, wherein the Russian population serves up an at times grotesquely distorted echo of the original television content: from a skewed solo accordion ode to Trump tattoos on children’s arms to a rap anthem to the American president, nothing is off limits when it comes to celebrating “our” new president.
With the help of an ironic soundtrack, Pozdorovkin creates a revealing “panorama view” of the official party line followed by Russian media and simultaneously holds a mirror – in the era of fake news – up to the West.