A damning portrayal of the dirty war between Russian leader Vladimir Putin and the oligarchs--in particular long-imprisoned oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky--Cyril Tuschi's documentary has made its way to the festival circuit despite much skulduggery on the part of those whom the film seeks to expose and embarrass. In the course of making the film, Tuschi and his crew were harassed and threatened, and the final cut of the film was stolen from Tuschi's Berlin office. We hope it arrives here safely!
Using a mix of wide-ranging interviews, archival footage and computer animation, Khodorkovsky tells the gripping story of its titular figure, who went from chemistry student to owner of Yukos, the massive Russian oil firm that was privatized in the hairy free-for-all of Boris Yeltsin's rule, making him one of the country's most powerful men before the age of 40. An open critic of Putin who put his money where his mouth was, Khodorkovsky funded human-rights groups, opposition political parties, and a charity called Open Russia while publicly questioning the leader about political corruption. Since 2003, he has been in a Siberian prison, on tax-evasion charges that David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, called “absurdist acts of injustice no more respectable than the railroading of Josef Brodsky