“Odessa Steps 2022” by experimental artist and filmmaker Tan Tan is one of the first movies to come in New Asian Filmmakers Collective's anti-war campaign “Against the war, in the name of cinema”. The short uses scenes from Sergei Eisenstein's masterpiece “Battleship Potemkin” to explore the current invasion of Ukraine.
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In many ways, Tan Tan's short documentary reminds the viewer of “A Monologue about Home” and “News Feed On My…”, both from the same campaign by New Asian Filmmakers Collective. Like the former, it juxtaposes present and past as a way to comment on humanity. Here, however, the scenes from the past are taken not from 1990's USSR, but from Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 “Battleship Potemkin.” Later on, Tan Tan draws parallels between the Nazi attacks of Odessa and the current ones, putting into question the official Russian narratives about the invasion.
In her statement about the film, the director speaks about the moment she realized that Odessa, the place where one of the most important and lauded scenes of Eisenstein's movie takes place, is not in Russia but in Ukraine. Lee Soojung mentions the same thing in her short about news, social media, and isolation. This mistake of the conquered with the conqueror speaks points not only to the widespread confusion about where some of Russia's greatest pieces of art come from, but also of the cultural diversity and geopolitical complexity in that region of the world.
“Odessa Steps 2022” starts with a trigger warning, but nothing can prepare the viewer for the instances of extreme violence that Tan Tan shows in this short. Around the middle, we start seeing more and more news and social media footage containing human and animal corpses, shelling of buildings, even a mother wailing over the body of her murdered daughter. All of that only in Odessa, but one city is enough. We can imagine the atrocities committed by the Russian army in harder hit cities.
In the director's statement for her film, Tan Tan says that she does not aim to discuss the political context of the war, only to question the lack of human progress between the depiction in Eisenstein's movie and what is happening in Ukraine now. She manages to do that, but only to a certain extent. Because despite her claim for objective distancing from the political aspects of the invasion, she shows the brutality of the Russian army and heroism of the Ukrainian fighters, in a way condemning the first and lauding the second. This makes “Odessa Steps 2022” a fiercely political piece of filmmaking.
