When Oscar-nominated director Richard Rowley (“Dirty Wars”) first set out to make a documentary about the Russian state-funded private mercenary faction The Wagner Group, he believed he was chronicling a specific phenomenon. As his research progressed, he realized the film was about something much bigger: how the crumbling of our modern notion of democracy has opened up a dangerous space for lawless, unpredictable and — even more terrifyingly, rapidly expanding — for-hire legions. The result of that work is “Hell’s Army,” having its world premiere at CPH:DOX.
“Hell’s Army” trails dissident Russian journalist Katya Hakim as she chases The Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin across the globe, including Ukraine, Syria and the Central African Republic. The journalist moves in the shadows, having been put onto dangerous lists and seen several colleagues either killed or severely harmed at the hands of the mercenaries. Speaking with Variety ahead of the Danish festival, Rowley recalls how he began his research by contacting veteran journalist Denis Korotkov.
“You can’t make a film about Wagner without talking to Denis,” he says. “He’s the man who exposed them in print for the first time and developed a network of contacts inside the organization that no one else has.” Korotkov introduced the director to his team at The Dossier Center, an investigative project founded in 2017 by the Russian civil activist and former political prisoner Mikhail Khodorkovsky. The group conducts independent research into corruption, money laundering and international political interference involving individuals connected to the Russian authorities.
Richard Rowley, courtesy of Jeff Vespa / Getty Images
This is also when Rowley met Hakim. At that point, it became “clear” to the filmmaker that the journalist would be “an amazing protagonist.” “She’s intense and a great investigator. She is focused to the point of obsession and courageous to the point of recklessness.”
Having the triad of Hakim, Korotkov and the Dossier Center provided “something unique” to Rowley: Korotkov’s inside access, Hakim’s on-the-ground reporting, and the Dossier’s anonymous team, capable of hacking and obtaining documents and information about the Wagner across the world. “It allowed us both to be global in scope and also intimate in following this one character through all of the chaos and violence of war.”
“I’ve probably spent around 30 years making movies about war,” continues the director. “I think war makes clear the symptoms of our darkest cultural sicknesses. I’ve been concerned with and tracking the rise of mercenaries since I saw them on the ground in Iraq in 2004, but when Wagner emerged from the shadows, it was clear we had entered a completely new paradigm. They fielded 30,000 soldiers, larger than most of the armies of Europe. They’re the first private company to conquer a European city in 500 years.”
Once immersed in the world of Wagner, Rowley says he realized his film pointed to an “even darker reality” in its grasp of the current “authoritarian turn in our global culture.” “Democracies don’t need mercenary armies,” emphasizes the director. “They’re what states turn to when they are taken over by thugs and gangsters. That’s where the urgency comes from, the fear that this darkness is coming everywhere and the hope that there’s still time to sound an alarm for us all to choose a different collective future.”
Courtesy of CPH:DOX
Prodded about how working closely with journalists on the film, as well as his own experience as a journalist himself, made him aware of the fragile nature of the practice in an increasingly politically fragmented landscape, Rowley says he believes we are witnessing “the death of the liberal order we had lived under in the post-war period.” This, of course, directly affects journalists’ abilities to faithfully capture the actions of those increasingly shielded by power.
“That’s why I open the film with the famous Antonio Gramsci quote,” he notes. “We are living in a moment when this world is gone, and we are not yet capable of constructing a new kind of social order. The attacks and the destruction of journalism are part and parcel of this entire kind of devolution of the world we’ve lived in.”
The director makes a point of noting that, despite his film being set thousands of miles away from the United States, it should ring an alarm in his home country. “The authoritarian and oligarchic tendencies that are visible in Russia are visible in the United States as well. Of course, the mercenaries that were rising inside the U.S. military establishment in Iraq were, in many ways, an inspiration to Putin and the Kremlin to create their own operation. The complete media control in Russia… I mean, there’s an increasingly narrow space that we operate in inside the United States as well. I’ve felt [it] in my work.”
Given this dire assessment of the state of the world, is Rowley still hopeful about the future? “Definitely,” he promptly responds.
“There is no reason to make these films if you don’t,” he goes on. “Whenever you talk to victims of horrible violence, you find people who want to be heard and who deeply believe in the power of those stories. Even though they take risks to speak to you, they are taking those risks because they believe that the work you do is important and it matters. I feel that whether or not I lose hope in one moment or another, I have a responsibility to those people to make their faith worth something.”
“Hell’s Army” is produced by Richard Butler, Atanas Georgiev, Odessa Rae, Rebecca Teitel and Caitlin McNally. Midnight Films handles international sales.
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