HOT DOCS 2018: ACTIVE MEASURES Mines the Depths of the Trump-Putin Ties

For at least two years, all anyone has been able to talk about is American politics. Even in Canada, ever since Trump was elected to become the so-called “Leader of the Free World,” most of us spend our time being updated on the happenings below the border, often to horrifying results. It regularly feels like over the last couple of years, something has been set in motion that threatens the very notion of democracy.

What Active Measures (directed by Jack Bryan) demonstrates is that rather than just the last few years, a threat against democracy has been building for decades. We may have only started paying attention to this type of Russian interference once everyone’s worst fears of Trump as President came true, but it turns out these types of infiltrations, or “active measures,” have been in place for long enough that it seems crazy that nobody saw this coming, and if they did why they did not try to stop it.

Though much of the information in the film related to Trump’s scandals are the shocking things we’ve been hearing about for over a year — his ties to Russia are hardly new territory for speculation — what the film does present is a comprehensive plot of the story from the beginning, years before Trump becoming president was a plausible notion. Aimed at Western audiences, Active Measures does a deep-dive into Russian politics, specifically focusing on Putin’s rise to power, and his vested interest in keeping it. This is helpful for viewers like myself who do not know the specifics of, say, Russia’s war with Georgia, but the information overload does start to feel overwhelming after a while.

Despite this overload, all the information presented is necessary in establishing motive, and the filmmakers present a compelling, and well-sourced, case for how and why Russia influences elections — not just American but also the elections of many countries where they feel the need to cause a disruption. By showing us how earlier Kremlin plots in other countries mirror what took place in the States, the film takes us from point A to Point B to Point C in a way that we can understand, mostly with the help of hundred of documents and a large number of interviews with knowledgable people.

There are interviews with various political operatives and journalists from all over the political spectrum, which renders it difficult to write off the film as partisan, though I’m sure there will be those who try (and I would implore anyone about to make this claim to actually watch the film before passing judgement). With the two most famous of the interviewees being Hillary Clinton and John McCain, the filmmakers signal their desire to craft a film as unbiased, well-rounded, and well-sourced as possible. They are not searching for a political win, the are just searching for the truth.

I’ve now seem multiple documentaries at this year’s Hot Docs that provide compelling arguments for how social media can be used as a tool for destruction, whether it is the destruction of one person’s life or of an entire country. It is necessary to do all that we can to protect ourselves from the false narratives that are so easily injected into our feeds. One way to do this is by informing ourselves. During the Q&A, the filmmakers pointed us to their website, activemeasures.com, which, along with many of their sources and information on Russian propaganda techniques, has a way to check if you have personally been involved with unknowingly spreading Russia propaganda on Facebook. Active Measures shows just how

www.activemeasures.com