During the summer of 1975, politicians from the East and the West met in the Finnish capital for the Helsinki Conference, with the purpose of discussing security and cooperation. They included US president Henry Ford, US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt, and others. The event was extraordinary. At the height of the Cold War, with East and West heavily armed with nuclear weapons, diplomacy was a nerve-wrecking tightrope walk.
Underlying suspense gets its fair share in Franck’s inventive piece of Cold War cinema. The movie’s strongest feature is its sense of humour, an essential ingredient of diplomacy. “If you laugh together, you see the humanity in the other one”, Finnish director Arthur Franck said about his film. He watched hundreds of hours of archive footage and condensed them in his own creation. The story opens with Kissinger debating with himself the US policy of détente (relaxation of tensions). Franck claims that, while some of the voices and images are AI-generated, the events, meetings, and dialogue are accurate.
The deceptively realistic AI reconstructions evokes ambivalent feelings. Some AI-generated images are quite easy to identify. Others are seamlessly mixed with authentic footage. The outcome is a multilayered, intellectual exploration of the event, officially called the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). Franck frames it as a pivotal moment in history, which eventually led to the eventual downfall of the Soviet Union. In total, 35 nations gathered in order to discuss peace, territorial integrity, economic cooperation, and human rights.
The three “baskets” of the Helsinki Accords – human rights, security and cooperation provisions – provide the film with some dramatic edge. The Soviet Union dismissed those as propaganda concessions. The non-binding agreement would serve as a political lever against Soviet repression. It eventually became an essential lifeline for political dissidents across the Eastern Bloc. Talking heads interviews with activists, diplomats, and historians help to substantiate this. The Accorss gave moral and rhetorical protection to the Soviet critics who lived in the Union. The film title alludes to such unforeseen repercussions of the Conference, and more
All present leaders – including Brezhnev – signed the Helsinki Accords. Chronicling the lengthy talks that led to such achievement could have easily lapsed into dry and dull documentary-making. But Franck manages to find the wit and spontaneity in the bureaucratic proceedings. He reimagines the diplomatic summit as an amalgam of detective story and mystery drama. The developments oscillate between fly-on-the-wall documentary and political thriller. Only that the actors are replaced by historical figures, with Kissinger taking the lead role. Black-and-white and colour archive material gets its dialogue from declassified audio transcripts and voice simulations.
Franck discloses the AI-generated aspects of his movie in order to craft sense a sense of transparency. The narrative sticks close to the actual events, avoiding imaginary digressions and gimmicky exaggerations. Franck himself takes on the role of narrator, which is perhaps the film’s biggest downfall. His voiceover often slips into didacticism. His attempts at humanising the politicians are a little heavy-handed. Brezhnev smokes and drinks vodka, Ford worries about his domestic life, and Kissinger seems almost heroic. Playfulness makes the proceedings look trivial.
This docudrama is intriguing, informative and engaging. The AI-generated elements are so effective that they often viewers asking whether some of the developments may have been fictionalised.
The Helsinki Effect just showed at Tiff Romania.
