Iron Butterflies

On 17 July 2014, a passenger jet en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur crashed over eastern Ukraine. All 298 people on board this Malaysian Boeing flight MH17 were killed. As the search for the causes begins, the world is still largely in the dark regarding the background. Was it a military operation? If so, whose? And anyway, which sides were fighting in the self-proclaimed "Donetsk People’s Republic" and what did the Dutch and Malaysian victims have to do with it? As we now know – and as this sober yet poetic essay film impressively documents – the long uncertainty about the fact that the plane was shot down by a Russian BUK missile was the result of a calculated and far-reaching Russian disinformation campaign.

Step by step, Roman Liyubyi's collage of archive material, news and social media clips as well as dramatised and animated elements lays bare the strategies behind this hybrid warfare, and exposes the mechanisms that were used to create a dense smokescreen around the true political and military situation. A painful lesson in revelation that also helps us to better understand the present.

Source: 73. Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin (Catalogue)