The Great Idea social innovations platform, assisted by the crowd-funding project Spilnokosht, has begun to raise funds to finish the film Trial, directed by Askold Kurov and Andrii Lytvynenko, about the case of Oleh Sentsov, a Ukrainian film director and scriptwriter, who was arrested by the Russian security service in Crimea for allegedly planning a terrorist act. As is known, a Russian court jailed Sentsov for 20 years on a trumped-up charge of “establishing a terrorist organization.”
The directors say they began to shoot the film as far back as July 2014 simultaneously in Moscow and Kyiv. Askold Kurov, who knows Oleh personally, was so much astonished by the history of Sentsov’s conviction that he decided to give a detailed account of the political prisoner’s case in a documentary film. Approximately at the same time, another film director, Andrii Lytvynenko, began to mull over making a documentary in Ukraine. The two directors met in the midsummer of 2014 and decided to join their efforts in carrying out this project.
Spilnokosht’s website notes that it took more than a year to do the filming. “As we could film Oleh in the courtroom only, we had to search for other options to acquaint audiences with the hero. We decided to tell Oleh’s story by interviewing his relatives and friends, through his writings, sometimes animated, through the events that had occurred in that year, and via the stories of the heroes who launched this project and changed their lives,” the film’s authors say.
The film crew worked in Crimea, Kyiv, Rostov-on-Don, and Moscow for a year. The work is now at the home stretch – the film is being edited, voiced over, and colored. This is expected to last for several months and finish in the spring of 2016.
“What made us hit upon the idea of a film is our weakness, a feeling that we cannot influence the destiny of this person who simply wants to live in a free country and make films. It would seem that the Soviet methods of ‘bloody terror’ have gone long ago, but present-day events show, unfortunately, just the contrary,” the filmmakers say in a plea to those who can offer financial assistance. “We hope the finished film will make a contribution to the international campaign in defense of Oleh Sentsov and help him be freed. Sometimes we have no right to keep silent.”
The shooting is over now. Funds are being raised for editing and post-editing in order to ensure a high quality of the whole work. The film is presumably to be shown in Ukraine and at many international festivals, which have already voiced their support for Oleh. In case of a successful distribution, some of raised funds will be handed over to the families of the political prisoners Sentsov, Afanasiev, and Kolchenko.
Spilnokosht has so far raised 9,500 out of the 35,000 hryvnias needed for finishing the film.
