Il était une fois la Tchétchénie
Nino Kirtadzé
2001 - 57 min - Beta digital - Couleur - France

On December 25, 1994, Boris Eltsin declared that "order and lawfulness will be restored in Chechnya." For the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the birth of Russia Federation, the Kremlin decided, despite the reluctance of the army and deputies, to settle an internal political conflict by military means.
The first military campaign lasted two years and only succeeded in destroying the image of an "unbeatable Russian army" and stress the Chechnyan people's incredible capacity for resistance. Three years later, in 1999, it all started over again: Russian troops invaded Grozny, and the bombings went on for months.
To understand this war in all its dimensions, the filmmaker compared and contrasted the eyewitness accounts of five correspondents of different nations and cultures, all of whom had covered both Chechnyan conflicts for international press agencies. These accounts reconstitute the sequence of events, clarifying revelatory highlights with a professional and personal viewpoint.
Each journalist's version of events is backed by footage they personally shot and selected. These subjective accounts are not always consistent with one another but their contradictions and confirmations reveal all the complexity of both the war and the profession of war correspondent.