Our New Pres­i­dent – first look review

The 2016 US pres­i­den­tial elec­tion feels a long time ago. How many life­times have flashed before our eyes with every new trav­el ban, depor­ta­tion sto­ry or nuclear threat? Step­ping back just six months prac­ti­cal­ly feels like time trav­el­ling. Max­im Pozdorovkin’s doc­u­men­tary, Our New Pres­i­dent, allows us to revis­it these recent mem­o­ries – but from a per­spec­tive that’s equal­ly fas­ci­nat­ing and horrifying.

String­ing togeth­er dozens of YouTube clips, wooly con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries and state-run news­casts in Rus­sia, the film dumps view­ers into the deep end of the fake news pool dur­ing the elec­tion and a few months into Trump’s pres­i­den­cy. The found footage is then cob­bled togeth­er for a some­times comedic and often bewil­der­ing effect. At times the doc­u­men­tary looks both like a hor­ror movie and an ambi­tious art film.

How­ev­er impres­sive the col­lec­tion, there’s lit­tle beyond shock val­ue in watch­ing Rus­sians on vlogs and TV shows prais­ing Trump. In tear­ing apart Hillary Clinton’s rep­u­ta­tion, the admi­ra­tion heaped upon Trump fuelled a cult of per­son­al­i­ty that’s refash­ioned the real estate tycoon as a folk hero. It’s not like­ly an acci­dent that most of the self-filmed trib­utes to the new Com­man­der-in-Chief are from men young and old, with women typ­i­cal­ly used objects in these videos if they’re there at all.

Some­where between a bizarre video attribut­ing Clinton’s ​“poor health” to a mummy’s curse and music videos where a rap­per impos­es Trump’s face over his own, the film’s mes­sage – what­ev­er it was – is lost. It leaves us emp­ty hand­ed and with an uneasy feel­ing. In the same way that we feel numb after so much bad news, sit­ting through 80 min­utes of is often over­whelm­ing. Our New Pres­i­dent would per­haps work bet­ter as a muse­um exhi­bi­tion, a col­lec­tion of arti­facts to be gawked at and learned from.

The hap­haz­ard assort­ment of footage is a peek into the man­u­fac­tured real­i­ty run­ning unchecked on the inter­net. The film’s sources looks to be laid out in chrono­log­i­cal order, but some of the clips seem to have come from the lunatic fringe, and not the state-run out­lets. This unfor­tu­nate­ly dulls the chill­ing thought of an organ­ised attack on the media with sil­ly fantasies.

There’s no buffer between the view­er and the absur­di­ties spewed up online. Real­i­ty and illu­sion are blurred so much here that if the film­mak­er insert­ed a fake exam­ple of fake news, one would have trou­ble spot­ting the lie. A well-made col­lage may be art, but it doesn’t always con­nect with its audi­ence, and if this documentary’s pur­pose is to inform then that may be an issue. There’s a 12-minute ver­sion of Our New Pres­i­dent that I found to be much more effec­tive. There’s no need to get lost in a muse­um of non­sense for so long.