Roman Karmen english documentary

"Among all arts, cinema is for us the most important," said Lenin.

Roman Karmen, an unofficial ambassador of the Soviet cause, lived his entire life in accordance with this maxim.

Who is Roman Karmen: officer, propagandist, filmmaker? Serving the Soviet regime, he was a war correspondent filming press footage in Spain in 1936, a special envoy to China in 1938 during the Sino-Japanese War, mobilized in the Red Army during World War II, and responsible for the Soviet delegation at Nuremberg.

He transitioned between photojournalism and filmmaking, not hesitating to recreate major events that were not filmed, such as the Battle of Stalingrad. From the 1950s onward, he became the itinerant ambassador of socialist revolutions... He is a complex, multifaceted character who only shows what he wants to reveal, operating on the principle that there is no absolute truth in cinema.

By recounting Karmen's extraordinary journey, this documentary explores the function of images—or more precisely, their manipulation. An image always bears a signature, even through the chosen point of view; it must be shaped and constructed before being recorded. Roman Karmen, aware of this, places the viewer at the very heart of the struggles, whether in his "fictions" or journalistic films shot after the fact, as well as in his war documentaries.

Karmen is not immune to clichés, nourished by his political ideals. A faithful defender of socialism, he is present at all battles, wielding his camera as a weapon: he lauds Soviet heroes of labor in factories, films major symbols of socialism like illiteracy campaigns in Cuba, portrays Mao—then still unknown—reading Stalin, and deliberately ignores the terror spreading in his country by showing images of sailboats and well-being during the Gulag period...