Registration REQUIRED by 12pm on February 27, 2026 in order to attend this event.
Please join the Harriman Institute for a screening of “Politzek,” followed by a discussion with the film’s co-author Sacha Koulaeva and the film’s director Manon Loizeau. The event will be introduced by Jack Snyder, and Rachel Denber will moderate the post-screening discussion.
In Russia, criticizing the war in Ukraine or Vladimir Putin’s regime has become a crime. Thousands of ordinary citizens are being arrested, tried, and imprisoned. They are called “Politzek”: political prisoners. Filmed clandestinely over the course of more than a year, “Politzek” gives a platform to those who, despite the fear, continue to speak out against Putin’s repressive Russia. Through the intersecting stories of a teenager sentenced to five years in prison for criticizing the government on social media, a young artist jailed for placing anti-war stickers, a human rights activist, and two theater directors facing Kafkaesque trials, the film unveils the machinery of state repression in Russia. With rare footage, broken yet unyielding voices, this is a deeply human story of silenced resistance.
Sacha Koulaeva is an international expert on human rights and civil society, and a lecturer at Sciences Po Paris (PSIA) and American University of Paris (AUP). She has been a member of the Russian movement Memorial since the 1990s – a movement founded by Andrei Sakharov after the fall of the USSR and awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022. Having arrived in France in 2002, she joined the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), where for sixteen years she directed the Eastern Europe and Central Asia desk and carried out numerous field missions, documenting fundamental rights violations and developing advocacy and protection strategies, including in conflict and crisis zones. Since 2019, she has worked independently as an analyst, lecturer, and trainer in French, English, and Russian for various universities, NGOs, international institutions, and media outlets. Sacha Koulaeva has contributed her expertise to numerous journalistic investigations, notably working as Editorial Advisor and investigator for Manon Loizeau’s film “Belarus: An Ordinary Dictatorship” (Magneto Presse, for ARTE, 2018), and producing the dossier “Russia: A Thousand and One Female Faces of Protest published in Femmes Ici et Ailleurs” (#45, 2021). She is also co-author of the film “PolitZek” with Manon Loizeau (Babel Doc / Clin d’Œil Films, 2025). Sacha is the author or co-author of more than fifty reports from field missions, and has coordinated and edited over a hundred publications. She has also contributed to two collective works: “Chechnya, Ten Keys to Understanding” (La Découverte, 2003) published in French, German and Catalan and “The Other Faces of Russia” (Les Petits Matins, 2015) in French. Committed to artistic mobilization for human rights, she also co-organized the cultural Babel-Caucasus Caravan from France to the South Caucasus and the French tour of the Chechen dance group Daymokhkto France, at the Théâtre du Soleil in Paris, jointly with the association Marcho Doryila, which links art, culture, and solidarity to defend dignity and freedom wherever they are threatened.
Manon Loizeau, born to a French writer father and an English painter mother, she is the granddaughter of the British actress Dame Peggy Ashcroft, and the sister of the singer Emily Loizeau. After her studies at the IEP of Paris and an MPhil in Russian studies she left for Moscow where she remained for ten years. She worked for the BBC, Le Monde, the Nouvel Observateur and CAPA agency. She made her first documentary “Growing up under a straitjacket” on the internats for disabled children in Russia, a film that ended up changing the law on disability in Russia. In 2006, she received the Albert-Londres Prize (french equivalent of the Pulitzer Price) for her film directed with Alexis Marant “Missing Women” (ARTE) about unwanted girls in India, Pakistan, and China. Committed to making forgotten voices heard, Manon Loizeau has directed numerous documentaries in Chechnya. Her last film there “Chechnya, War Without Traces” (ARTE) was awarded in many festivals in 2015. She directed documentaries in Iran including “Letters from Iran,” for ARTE, filmed clandestinely with Iranian women for two years. She also filmed in Syria, Yemen, Burma, and Belarus. In 2017, she directed the film “Silent War” for France 2, in which Syrian women testified for the first time on rape as a weapon of war in the prisons of Bashar al-Assad. Manon Loizeau recently released “Life Ahead,” a long feature documentary for France 2 on the diary of Elahe, a 14-year-old Afghan girl growing up on the roads of exile. She has just co-directed with Ksenia Bolchakova “The Occupiers” for ARTE.
