The Politics of Russian Revisionism: Narrative Authority in Film and Digital Media

This paper argues that Western film festivals, universities, and liberal media institutions can participate in epistemic harm when they platform politically sensitive works without adequate historical framing. Extending Walter Benjamin’s account of the aestheticisation of politics into a decentralised, profit-driven media environment, it examines how aesthetic and curatorial decisions across film and digital dissemination help define what counts as a valid picture of the past. Through four case studies-Mikhail Kalatozov’s Soy Cuba (1964), Rusudan Glurjidze’s The Antique (2024), Anastasia Trofimova’s Russians at War (2024), and Mikhail Zygar’s historical YouTube videos-it traces mechanisms of narrative gatekeeping, sentimentalisation, selective voice, and cartographic erasure that reframe imperial violence in post-Soviet and postcolonial memory. Drawing on theories of epistemic violence and witnessing, the paper shows how curated absence in cinema mirrors algorithmic filtering in digital space, shifting moral attention away from victims. It proposes that epistemic repair requires a cross-media ethical framework combining representational justice with infrastructural safeguards-provenance systems, algorithmic transparency, and the contextualisation of culturally sensitive works by the institutions that circulate them.