The Producers
Yury Khashchavatski is a documentary director and has shot more than 30 documentaries and features (his most famous works are The Ordinary President, The Counter-claim, Russian Happiness, The Oasis, The Gods of the Hummer and Sickle, The Prisoners of the Caucasus, Sunny Clown). He won the Peace Award at the Berlin Film Festival, and was a Russian Union of Writers winner after A.D. Sakcharov. He is a Grand Prix winner and a prize winner at film festivals in New York, Geneva, Kiev, Berlin, Minsk, San Francisco, St.Petersburg, Munich, Yekaterinburg, Leipzig, Freichburg and Belgrade. He is also a member of the Eurasian Television Academy (ETA) and the International Academy of Television and Radio (IATR).
Making The Film
"For a long while I wanted to make a documentary to depict the influence of mass media on public conscience, and then there was the Russian aggression against Georgia. It was a new, previously unknown method to inform the public: Russian channels broadcast news before the relevant events would ever happen. In order to obtain unbiased information, my production team went to Georgia. I started to compare official information with actual facts and realized that total brainwashing was going on. Indeed, where the mass media has a single point of control, as it is the case in Russia, and the mass media is monopolized by the highest ranks, no concentration camps are required: with the use of propaganda and lies, "barbed wire" can be stretched above every head. I do not know how to resist this, but pay attention to this threat in my movie."