An engaging documentary-drama uses AI to revive archival footage and political protocols
For all the complex insight Arthur Franck’s docudrama provides, it leaves a crucial question up to the viewer: Is his film a documentary with a strong tendency towards fictionalization? Or is it a political drama with a strong foundation in facts? One thing is certain: The result is both informative and engaging. And much more entertaining than one would expect from a work with so many old white men in grey suits. But these men are Ford, Brezhnev, Schmidt, Brandt, and Henry Kissinger. Their meeting at the Helsinki Conference in 1975 was in itself an extraordinary event. 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 bit of Cold War Cinema. However, its strongest feature is humor. This is very fitting. After all, humor also appears to be an essential aspect of diplomacy. “If you laugh together, you see the humanity in the other one.”, the Finnish director said about his film. He watched hundreds of hours of archive footage and condensed them in his film. It opens with a grainy scene of Kissinger, debating with himself about détente. While the voices and sometimes also images are AI generated, the events, meetings, and dialogue are accurate. At least, this is what Franck claims.
While there is no reason to disbelief, the deceptively realistic AI reconstruction evokes ambivalent feelings. Some AI generated images are quite easy to identify. Others are seamlessly mixed with authentic footage. Nevertheless, the product is an intellectually layered exploration of the titular event, officially called the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). Its dissection is all the more interesting since the Helsinki Conference, didn’t receive much attention in Cold War accounts. Franck frames it as a pivot point in history, elemental to the eventual downfall of the Soviet Union. In 1975, 35 nations gathered to discuss peace, territorial integrity, economic cooperation, and human rights.
Among them were the USA, UDSSR and most European states. There, in the Finnish capital, the political leaders signed the Helsinki Accords. This non-binding agreement would serve as a political lever against Soviet repression. Chronicling the lengthy talks that lead to this historic document could easily have become dry and dusty. But Franck manages to find the wit and spontaneity in the bureaucratic proceedings. He reimagines the diplomatic summit as an amalgam of political detective story and speculative drama. Only that the actors are replaced by historic characters, with Kissinger taking the lead role. Black-and-white and color archive material gets its dialogue from formerly classified audio transcripts and modern voice simulations.
To Franck’s favor, he always discloses the AI generated aspects to create full transparency. The narrative sticks close to the actual events, avoiding imaginary digressions and gimmicky exaggerations. The scenes fall between fly-on-the-wall documentary and political thriller. Franck himself takes on the role of narrator. This narration is one major flaw: it comes over as didactic, often pointing out the obvious. His attempts at humanizing the political key players tend to be heavy-handed. Brezhnev smokes and drinks vodka, Ford worries about his domestic life, and Kissinger seems almost heroic. Too much narrative playfulness makes a brutally repressive historical chapter seem trivial in hindsight. Despite this, the comical absurdities of global power dynamics are revealing: The SU proudly signs a human rights agenda that it never wanted in the first place.
Much of the film’s dramatic effectiveness hinges on the so-called “Basket Three” of the Helsinki Accords. These are provisions concerning human rights, freedom of thought, religion, and movement. The SU dismissed the clauses as propaganda concessions. But the would become an essential lifeline for political dissidents across the Eastern Bloc. Talking Heads interviews with activists, diplomats, and historians substantiate the importance of the Helsinki Accords. They gave moral and rhetorical cover to the Soviet critics who lived in the SU. These unplanned consequences of the summit inspire the film’s title. The daring blend of style and substance is almost uncannily timely in an era where facts and fiction merge.
- OT: The Helsinki Effect
- Director: Arthur Franck
- Year: 2025
