Putin's Witnesses

31 December 1999. Boris Yeltsin resigns without warning and the prime minister, Vladimir Putin, becomes acting president. The documentary maker Vitaly Mansky is in Yeltsin's house that night and beside Putin for the year that follows. His camera records the election night, the celebrations, the phone calls, Yeltsin's first regret. The footage was shot at the time for the state. Years later Mansky took the same recordings and built a different film out of them: how power was assembled, and who watched it happen and said nothing. Vitaly Mansky directs; a hundred and three minutes. Yeltsin, Gorbachev and Boris Nemtsov appear in the footage; Nemtsov was shot dead near the Kremlin in 2015. Mansky left Russia after 2014 and settled in Latvia.