Award-winning documentary VIDEO
THE REVOLUTION THAT WASN'T
A documentary by Aliona Polunina
English subtitles
THIS IS A GREAT DOCUMENTARY, awarded in numerous film festivals :
It tells the story of Anatoly TISHIN , former leader of the National Bolshevik Party (NBP - The Limonov Party) and his young son Grigory, sentenced to three years in prison when he was 17,
just to have held a ministry with his comrades, and thrown portrait of Putin in the window
(the famous trial of the 39 covered with sympathy by journalist Ana Politkovskaya in 2004)
It was in 2007 , when the pre- presidential campaign , when Limonov was
allied with Garry Kasparov and former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov .
Anatoly
TISHIN awaits the release of her son Grigory , it will even get to prison , 1,000 kilometers from Moscow.
We then sees the
son Grigory triumphantly welcomed by his comrades and Limonov .
Father Anatoly works in a morgue. He tells his interim head of the National Bolshevik Party from 2001 to 2003 , when Limonov was in prison. He was then removed , which he resented .
He then turned to the Orthodox religion
, preparing to become a priest.
His son Grigory TISHIN , traumatized by the prison and crowned with an image of a martyr , will follow Limonov as a bodyguard ( beautiful when you see the father , lost in the crowd a demo, look away his
son the side of Limonov , without hiding his jealousy. At 1:25:10 )
THERE has many scenes filmed demonstrations of NBP in the heart of the action. THERE also has intimate moments of the failed pre-election campaign of 2007, with Limonov and Garry Kasparov ( in SAint Petersburg and Moscow).
We really understands how to work Limonov 's party at that time.
After the first contemplative minutes (and aesthetically beautiful ) , this documentary promises to be exciting and informative.
English subtitles
AWARDS
- Prix du meilleur documentaire 20ème Festival du Film de Trieste, Italie 2009
- Prix Spécial du Jury au Festival international du film de Jihlava, République Tchèque 2008
- Prix Spécial du Jury au Festival international du 51e documentaire et du film d'animation de Leipzig (DOK de génération de programme), Allemagne, 2008
- prix Red-Vectracom au 31ème Festival "Cinéma du Réel", France, 2009
- Grand Prix du Festival International Human VI«Docudays.ua» à Kiev, en Ukraine 2009
- Prix Spécial du Jury "Pour un affichage unique de la réalité politique et, "" Kinoteatr.doc " , Russie 2009
- Grand Prix "Curiosités" - 18e Festival ouvert de la CEI et les Etats baltes "Kinoshock", Russie 2009
- Prix de la Guilde des critiques de films "Elephant" au Festival Ouvert 18 de la CEI et des Etats "Kinoshock" baltes, la Russie 2009
- 2ème Festival de Vilnius prix du Documentaire film (concurrence Baltique), en Lituanie 2009
- Prix "SIC Noticias" pour la meilleure enquête documentaire, le festival "DocLisboa", Portugal 2009
- Prix «pour le meilleur réalisateur du documentaire" festival "Listopad", Biélorussie 2009
- Prix national "Nika" Le meilleur de l'auteur du film non-fiction (films ART) 2009
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Washington Post - 2005
Kremlin Not Amused By Life of This Party
By Peter Finn
Tuesday, August 16, 2005
MOSCOW -- The 39 defendants sat in cages lined up against the
wall of a Moscow courtroom one day this month. The prisoners,
most of them students in their teens and early twenties, were
members of the National Bolshevik Party, a radical opposition
group with a penchant for tossing eggs at officials, gate-crashing
government buildings andgenerally thumbing their noses at
authority.
They are accused of creating a "mass disturbance" in December after
they burst into a reception room at the public offices of President
Vladimir Putin outside the Kremlin and waved a banner out the
window that read, "Putin Quit Your Job!"
But the prosecution of the political activists is part of a wider
government crackdown on the National Bolsheviks, a party with
ultranationalist roots that claims to have fashioned itself into a force for
democratic change and economic justice, including redistribution of
wealth.
The National Bolsheviks, whose name harkens back to the
revolutionaries led by Vladimir I. Lenin who founded the Soviet Union,
were banned in June by a Moscow court. Party lawyers said that was
the first time a political party had been outlawed in Russia since the fall
of the Soviet Union in 1991. The court held that the National Bolsheviks
were intent on "a forceful change of the foundations of the
constitutional regime."
The Russian Supreme Court was scheduled to rule on the party's
appeal of that decision on Tuesday. "We are the most courageous party,
we are the most uncontrolled," said the group's leader, Eduard
Limonov, 62, an iconoclastic Russian writer who twirls his gray,
Dali-esque moustache as he speaks. "We want to create a climate of
political freedom and so we are very irritating to the Kremlin. We make
the government crazy."
Occasionally, they even infuriate the lawyers trying to keep them out of
prison.
After their attorneys presented a motion calling for the release of the 39
defendants from their pretrial detention, the judge turned to the young
prisoners and asked if any of them had anything to say.
Up stood Julian Ryabtsev, a bespectacled skinhead wearing a T-shirt
with the inflammatory insignia of his party, a parody of the Nazi
banner with the Soviet Union's hammer and sickle substituted for the
swastika on a white circle surrounded by red.
"All of Russia is a jail," said Ryabtsev, 23, a former theology student at
a Russian Orthodox Church seminary who holds U.S. citizenship. "It
doesn't matter where we live."
The defense attorneys groaned and rolled their eyes. One of the
prosecutors smiled slightly. And the motion was quickly rejected.
The party's ability to galvanize young people -- it claims to have 22,000
members with hundreds more joining each month -- has unsettled the
Kremlin, which seems increasingly fearful of youth-driven rebellions of
the kind that toppled governments in Georgia and Ukraine.
"It's the only party that struggles for ordinary people, the only party
that is not afraid," said Sergei Karamnov, 28, a landscape gardener
who joined the party last week. To some political analysts, the
Kremlin's attempt to crush the National Bolsheviks has been
counterproductive. "Politically, it's very stupid," said Alexander
Tarasov, a senior analyst at the New Sociology and Practical Politics
Center in Moscow. "If they allowed them to register, I don't think they
could get one candidate elected. But now they are a symbol of resistance
and young people are turning to them."
The National Bolsheviks revel in political pranks. Activists have
squirted mayonnaise at the head of the Russian election
commission and dumped orange juice on the coach of the country's
soccer team, among other acts of what they call "food terrorism."
Another group of young people occupied offices in the Health Ministry
last summer after forcing the building's evacuation when they arrived
in fake uniforms and pretended to be the bomb squad. They then
tossed a portrait of Putin out the window.
The state has responded harshly. As many as 50 party activists are in
prison. And the defendants in the current trial face up to eight years in
prison for their two-hour occupation, which ended when police
stormed the building.
The party was founded in 1994 by Limonov and figures from what he
calls the cultural avant-garde. The party's flag was adapted from
Limonov's books and the group was initially regarded as a
countercultural oddity with some neo-fascist and hard-line nationalist
ideas.
Limonov had returned to Russia after years in exile in the United
States and France following the collapse of the Soviet Union. He
worked in Manhattan as a housekeeper for a wealthy family and later
turned his misadventures in the city and his scathing take on American
life into semi-autobiographical novels, such as "It's Me, Eddie," that
were acclaimed in Paris.
Limonov now says the group has become a "classical left-wing party"
that has shed its chauvinistic origins. His opponents in the government
are unconvinced.
"If chauvinist, pro-fascist forces provoke an upsurge of Islamic
extremism, it would pose a serious threat to the integrity of our
multicultural state," Vladislav Surkov, deputy chief of staff in the
Putin administration, said in an interview with the German magazine
Der Spiegel. And some members make little attempt to hide their
xenophobia. At a party meeting in Moscow this week, an activist
visiting from Murmansk spoke bitterly about Chinese moving into his
city and taking jobs from Russians.
Limonov was sentenced to four years in prison in 2001 for his part in
what the state said was an attempt to foment a coup in Kazakhstan. He
was released after 2 1/2 years, a period in which he wrote eight books,
including his reflections on 52 leading world figures, from Mao to
Marilyn Monroe.
"I became wiser and more tolerant," Limonov said of his time in
prison. "Prison is a good school of life."
Such sentiments infuriate the parents and friends of some of the young
people who could face long prison sentences for the antics he dreams
up. "I'm very angry with him," said Natalia Lind, whose 23-year-old
son, Vladimir, a former philosophy student in St. Petersburg, is on
trial. "These kids are like steppingstones for him."
Limonov rejects the allegation, but the party, on the back of its
activists' willingness to confront the state, has forced its way into the
middle of Russia's fragmented opposition. The National Bolsheviks are
now forming loose alliances with the youth wings of the Russian
Communist Party and the reformist Yabloko party.
Limonov sees his young charges as the opposition's street vanguard
during the parliamentary elections in 2007 and the presidential
election in 2008. He said he admired the tactics of the protesters whose
Orange Revolution toppled the old regime in Ukraine but is no fan of
the country's new president, Viktor Yushchenko. At a party meeting
this week, Limonov sported a T-shirt with the words "For Ukraine
without Yushchenko."
"We need a confrontation with Putin, and that is easy to organize, but
only with a union of opposition forces," Limonov said. The Kremlin, in
response, has organized its own youth group called Nashi, or Ours,
which organizers said will take to the streets to defend the existing
order in the event of any kind anti-establishment revolt in Russia.
Limonov relishes the prospect of a showdown. And he professes little
worry that he might face another, longer term in prison. Laughing, he
said, "I've still got my green card."
Look at the other pages of this website (115 including 34 in English)
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