The Editorial Office is a satire in the way it’s filmed and framed… however, the political and media landscape it exaggerates hardly feels overly exaggerated, it almost feels grounded, minus the shades of the supernatural near the end.
The film opens with Yura and a co-worker/friend trying to get pictures of a groundhog to get the classification of their forest recognized and protected in Europe. However, while they are out there, instead of capturing photos of the groundhog, they capture photos of arsonists. Yura’s co-worker doesn’t show up for work and his boss is dismissive of what they saw, so he seeks to get it published. At the first place he attempts to go, they won’t publish it, they are barely managing to hold onto their offices from governmental raiders. They get referred to a different paper, one that not only buys the photos but also offers Yura a job. Only they don’t publish the photos.
Yura ends up discovering that much of what the paper publishes is doctored stories. From a tragic incident of murder meant to captivate and intrigue readers that was completely fabricated, to photo ops of political parties meant to show they are building things for the people, except as soon as the camera leaves, the entire site is deconstructed. He tries to report on the latter only to have his photos again bought and unpublished. He’s directed instead to make a political candidate go viral for dancing. This is the satire. Every time he tries to do hard journalism, he’s pushed to do puff pieces, fake news, and when he asks how he can make money… well he’s directed to acquire photos as a means of blackmail.
The Editorial Office (written by Alla Tyutyunnik and Dar’ya Averchenko) is the sophomore film from director Roman Bondarchuk known for his debut film Volcano (2018), which premiered at Karlovy Vary and won 12 international awards, including Ukraine’s Shevchenko National Prize. The Editorial Office began filming before the Russian invasion of the Ukraine and was completed during the ongoing conflict. According to a Variety interview with Bondarchuk, the fate of most of the cast of the film is unknown, with some having fled to family abroad, or turned out to be collaborators and gone to Russia. Many of the locations filmed in have since been destroyed. Perhaps that’s part of the reason why the film itself feels a little less like satire and more like a stylized reflection of reality.
I will think a lot about the final scene of the film where Yura’s dream of having the forest marked as protected is realized. However, like everything that came before the reforestation efforts are just another photo op, and as soon as the cameras turn away, things start getting packed up. Everything about that scene worked for me, because those trees they were planting were not packed for transplantation. They were unlikely to have rooted. They were probably dead when they were pulled from their original pots. And even if they did take, they looked like more pine, which had already been established in a previous scene to be trees that sucked up all the nutrients and weren’t indigenous to the area.
The Editorial Office will have its World Premiere at the 74th Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale) in the Forum section.
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