Matt Sarnecki on The Killing of a Journalist
Courtesy of Matt Sarnecki.
On the surface, this sophomore feature from Matt Sarnecki (Killing Pavel) is an investigative documentary that follows Pavla Holcová’s discovery of the factors that led to the murder of Slovakian journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiance Martina. However, when the film goes deep into the matter, it explores the corrupt nature of many systems and how they overlap. This event sparked widespread protests and a political crisis in the country as Kuciak was the first journalist murdered in Slovakia since the country's independence.
“An attack on a journalist is an attack on all of us.” That is the English translation of a set of words featured in a Slovakian demonstration banner during the trial of businessman Marian Kočner. The camera is nimble around the standing, assertive crowd when the operator captures most of the phrase before tilting to the photos of Martina and Ján. It then cuts to a similar setting in the evening, revealing many Slovakian citizens care about it and determination to keep fighting against the authorities.
The Killing of a Journalist will make its world premiere at the 2022 Hot Docs Documentary Film Festival (April 28 - May 8). It is produced by Signe Byrge Sørensen, the head of production company Final Cut for Real (The Act of Killing, The Look of Silence, Flee) and edited by Janus Billeskov Jansen (The Hunt, Flee, Strong Island). Sarnecki recently sat down with me via zoom before its screening about exposing corruption in Slovakia, the state of journalism in the country, and maintaining an objective agenda when bringing in attorneys of all parties involved.
- NOTE: This conversation is edited & condensed for clarity. -
EF: Thank you for bringing this portrait of corruption to Hot Docs. What inspired you to tell this story?
MS: I don’t want to be callous, but there have been plenty of films about the murder of journalist. What was really important to me was that it could be turned into a blueprint of how corruption works around the world. And that's what the second part of the film is about. Going through these messages and seeing how this convicted businessman really kind of managed, to some extent corrupted the upper echelons of Slovak society. So it was really the chance to tell the bigger story around the murder of Ján and his fiancee, that was the starting point.
EF: Where were you when you first heard of Ján and his fiance's murders? What made you go on with it?
MS: Well, this is kind of the interesting part of the story. So right after the murders, I was invited to the village of Veľká Mača, where Ján was murdered with his fiancee. Because we weren't thinking about a documentary film at this point. It was really an investigation in my previous film [Killing Pavel], which was about the murder of a journalist publisher mentioned Ukraine, we had use CCTV to make a forensic investigation to find people that were suspicious and to l turn the investigation into something substantial. So initially, I went down there to try to work with the CCTVs and put together what happened around the scene of the crime. But the local officials and the police weren't willing to let us work with that CCTV footage. So a year goes by. I get a call from [investigative journalist] Pavla Holcová. She told me she had come into possession of the 70 terabyte case file. She started to explain to me what was inside. It wasn't just the police investigation, but it was also the laptops and telephones of this businessman, and she had started to trawl through them. It didn't just suggest corruption, it was absolute proof of corruption in this. That's when I thought it would could be a nice way to weave the story of this murderer into a greater story of corruption.
EF: Because of the amount of corruption, there aren't many rights for the press in Slovakia. How do you see that correlation?
MS: It's interesting to bring up the example of Russia right now. After the invasion of Ukraine, where Russia has completely extinguished all independent media and also any sort of form of protest. In Slovakia, there still are democratic principles where there is freedom of the press. If you look at what brought down the government's worthies was the work of the people who went to the streets and the work of these journalists in tandem. It's not a worst case scenario. Slovakia is not Russia. In Slovakia, there's more of the threat, but there's still a functioning democracy.
EF: As there is that functional democracy, is there a better future for the safety of journalists when they deal with this certain field?
MS: People talk about the 90s in Central and Eastern Europe and going back to Russia, you had a lot of journalists that were killed over the last two decades. In Russia, the culprits were never brought to justice. That's, I would say, different from the case of the European unit. The trial of Marian Kočner is still ongoing. But at least there's a semblance of justice and that's a deterrent when people see that you can't get away with it. But at the same time, we're seeing some political trends in Central and Eastern Europe towards these more illiberal democracies, like Hungary. We have the elections in France. Next week, we have Serbia, where, to some extent, they're demonizing journalists and creating an atmosphere for impunity, which is really concerning.
EF: One of my favorite quotes in the film that was said by Zlata (Martina’s mom) is that “you write about bad people, and I'm worried about you.” Is there any “good person” to write about within investigative journalism?
MS: Investigative journalists are looking to expose the hidden secrets of a society. I think it's easier to say if you're a good investigative journalist, you're looking at a lot of different subjects. And if you find in your research that you have a suspicion that this person might be involved in corruption, and you dig deeper, and you can't prove that corruption. The thing is, you just don't write about it, you drop the story. That's why investigative journalism is so time consuming. So sometimes you're looking for a bad guy, and then you realize that person that I'm investigating, actually, I can't find any evidence of wrongdoing. So you drop the story, that means it doesn't get published. So to answer your question, are there ever any good guys? I think oftentimes, you're working with different sources. For example, within this case, someone that leaked the police file was very concerned that if this wasn't leaked, a lot of bad things wouldn't be uncovered. So I don't say that you're interacting with people that have good intentions. Oftentimes, it's the people that put themselves out there and risk talking to expose wrongdoing that you're dealing with.
EF: How do you get access to the police and security camera footage? I don’t know Slovakia’s equivalent to the US's FOIA [Freedom of Information Act].
MS: This didn't go through a FOIA, it didn't work through the traditional channels. It was provided to me by the journalist. The access and documentaries is so key, I look at the ability to have Marian Kočner’s lawyer [Marek Para] appear in the film. The antagonist of the film is the man has been accused of the murder and it takes a lot of balls for the for the lawyer to agree to appear appear in it, and I am happy I did. But there's a lot of convincing that goes [with it]. You tell them you're making a film and the film is about a murder that your client has been accused of masterminding it. It's not always the easiest thing to do with the lawyer telling, “why would I ever participate in this?” He's a lawyer, and his job was to represent his client. I think he did a pretty good job of representing his client in the film.
EF: It's a movie where the lawyers’ clients [who have allegations] worry about their clients' appearance. How do you convince that client's lawyer to appear in the doc?
MS: I think he trusted us. I mean, it's very simple. If you think about it, I told him that part of this documentary will be analyzing the evidence, analyzing the guilt. And the better you make a case for your client, the better the film will be. And so your role is to give the most robust defense of your client. I think he was convinced he could do a good job. And he agreed to it.
EF: As there are other attorneys involved in the film, how do you make sure that you keep an objective agenda and not be able to tell the audience to go on one specific side of the case?
MS: I think that that's why I'm so happy that the accused lawyer participated. Because if we couldn't get him to participate, we would have only been working with the lawyers for the victims. It would have been hard to present the counter evidence. The audience gets to decide. I mean, we would have preferred to have actually watched the trial live, which was not possible due to Slovak legislation. But I believe that we did a very good job of presenting the most important parts of the evidence both on behalf of the prosecution and the defense. That's kind of where it comes to the trust of the filmmaker and you make your reputation on not being biased and treating the subject fairly. I think we did that.