The Kyiv Files

Walter Stokman / Netherlands / 2023 / 78 min

Knowledge is power, and on that account, the Soviet intelligence service KGB was an immensely powerful organisation, reaching deep into the private lives of citizens during the Cold War. Now, the KGB’s archives in Ukraine are being opened to the public for the first time, and boxes of secret documents from the Soviet era are coming to light. Finally, many of the country’s senior citizens can have answers to questions that have haunted them for decades. The KGB’s work was based on a dark combination of surveillance, self-censorship and distrust even of those closest to you. A female dissident, an amateur spy from the Netherlands and a French tourist who was betrayed 50 years ago by the man she thought loved her. Three people whom we get to experience as they finally get to see their own case files. But ‘The Kyiv Files’ is not a film about a dusty past at a convenient distance – quite the opposite. Manipulation and mistrust are perhaps more than ever a weapon in the shadow wars of the former Soviet Union.