An anti-Russian film festival was closed in St. Petersburg, only one screening was canceled in Moscow

The St. Petersburg branch of Rospotrebnadzor banned screenings as part of the ArtDocFest festival at the cinema house and at the Lendok studio, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.

The formal reason was non-compliance with anti-epidemic safety standards, but the organizers believe that the matter is something else, although they claim that they do not understand what.

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“The funny thing is that we don’t see the reason. This year the festival is more relaxed and socially distanced than ever. We have a lot of piercing films about people, about personalities, about all sorts of private things, but there is nothing politically explosive in the program even in Moscow, and even more so in St. Petersburg,” said festival press attache Olga Komok in an interview with the liberal Dozhd TV channel.

Perhaps the organizers of the festival, known for its anti-Russian demarches, really felt the tension and tried to clean up the program, but they could not completely abandon the offensive attacks against ideological opponents.

Thus, in the annotation to the film by Ukrainian director Maria Shevchenko “Birthmark” it was stated that she made a trip to “occupied Crimea”. These words outraged activists of the patriotic organization SERB, and they began to call the police and warn about the impending crime.

As a result, the organizers of ArtDocFest, who had already encountered SERB, decided to cancel the show and even made changes to the annotation on the Internet (the “occupied Crimea” remained in the programs).

Let us recall that in 2017, at ArtDocFest, a scandal broke out in connection with the screening of Beata Bubenets’ film “Flight of the Bullet,” which glorified the punitive Ukrainian battalion “Aidar.” Then the patriots burst into the hall and demanded that the show be banned.

The artistic director of ArtDocFest, a native of Lviv, Russophobe and Navalny supporter, Vitaly Mansky, told Dozhd that his employees forcibly held Rospotrebnadzor and the police in St. Petersburg in order to prevent the screening of the film “Rastorguev” from being stopped. In this film, the authors blame businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, close to the President of the Russian Federation, for the death of a group of journalists in the Central African Republic in 2018.

Following his idol, the criminal blogger, Mansky began blaming Putin personally for “closing the festival.”

“What happened is called the endless rule of one person - Putin. St. Petersburg, as a provincial city (it was made provincial by the authorities), and who agreed with this offensive definition is not indignant at accepting the doctrine of its provinciality, and not the cultural capital. This process of clearing out everything free on the territory of the Russian Federation is proceeding very quickly and energetically,” Mansky broadcast today on Ekho Moskvy.

At the same time, Mansky himself considers it possible to offend the feelings of an entire people. He refused to withdraw the Belgian director’s film “A Quiet Voice,” about a Chechen gay, from screening, although representatives of the Chechen diaspora in Moscow asked him to do so. Mansky ran to complain about the threats to Novaya Gazeta, but the Chechens decided the issue differently - they bought all the tickets to the screening of the scandalous film. The organizers were forced to cancel it.

A fan of Navalny, Mansky does not hide the fact that as part of his festival, lectures are held at which young directors are trained to film at unauthorized rallies. And with all this, the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation approves of ArtDocFest.