Sat 3 Mar 18:30 + live Director Q&A
“The unexpected Berlin Film Festival hit.” Helen Pidd reports for The Guardian:
“Proving there is nothing like a scandal to get bums on seats, the hot ticket at this year’s Berlin film festival was a documentary by an obscure German director about the jailed Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
“The film had been due for a handful of low-key screenings until someone stole it from the director’s office 10 days ago and suddenly everybody wanted to see it.
“In fairness, it was always an interesting proposition. With a budget of just €400,000 (£336,000), the director, Cyril Tuschi, claimed to have secured something no media organisation in the world had managed: an on-camera interview conducted through the bars of the dock during Khodorkovsky’s second trial in Moscow last year.
“Oddly, the interview itself is one of the less gripping scenes in the 113-minute documentary. It is remarkable only for the chipper attitude of the prisoner, who laughs at the charges against him – where on earth could he have hidden the 2bn barrels of oil he was alleged to have stolen, he asks Tuschi.
“Despite his claim of objectivity, Tuschi speaks to more of Khodorkovsky’s friends than foes. Those on his side include his mother, Marina, his ex-wife, and his eldest son, Pavel, who lives in exile in the US – as well as ex-Yukos highfliers Leonid Nevzlin and Mikhail Brudno, both now hiding from Interpol in Tel Aviv.
“It’s therefore no surprise that most people will leave the cinema thinking the baddie of the piece is not the man who plundered Russia’s resources for his own personal gain, but villainous old Vladimir Putin.
“Unsurprisingly, the Russian prime minister declined to be interviewed. But he crops up in newsreel footage throughout the film, including a famous televised press meeting he held with Russia’s richest men in February 2003, when Khodorkovsky, already flirting with opposition politics, brings up the topic of corruption. The look Putin gives him! It’s a death stare that says: you, my friend, will soon be sleeping with the carp at the bottom of the Volga (or failing that, a gulag six time zones away from Moscow).”
Join us on the eve of the Russian elections, and stay behind afterwards to meet the film’s director, Cyril Tuschi.
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