Updated on March 10, 2024, at 5:43 am Pt with comments from Oliver Stone.
A team of investigative journalists in Europe has published a new report that links Oscar-winning filmmaker Oliver Stone to a planned series of documentaries intended to act as de facto propaganda for several autocratic leaders worldwide.
The investigation — a joint effort by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (Occrp), German public broadcaster Zdf, Austrian newspaper Der Standard, German news magazine Der Spiegel and independent Kazakhstan media outlet Vlast — found that Russian American producer Igor Lopatonok pitched a series of hagiographic documentaries about such notorious leaders as Belarus strongman Alexander Lukashenko, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which were to star Stone as the on-air interviewer.
In an interview with Occrp, Lopatonok said Stone was aware of the projects and supported them, though the investigation did not turn up a direct link to the director to support that claim.
A team of investigative journalists in Europe has published a new report that links Oscar-winning filmmaker Oliver Stone to a planned series of documentaries intended to act as de facto propaganda for several autocratic leaders worldwide.
The investigation — a joint effort by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (Occrp), German public broadcaster Zdf, Austrian newspaper Der Standard, German news magazine Der Spiegel and independent Kazakhstan media outlet Vlast — found that Russian American producer Igor Lopatonok pitched a series of hagiographic documentaries about such notorious leaders as Belarus strongman Alexander Lukashenko, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which were to star Stone as the on-air interviewer.
In an interview with Occrp, Lopatonok said Stone was aware of the projects and supported them, though the investigation did not turn up a direct link to the director to support that claim.
- 3/8/2024
- by Scott Roxborough
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
While the war in Ukraine has upended global geopolitics and ratcheted up tensions between Russia and the West, the impact has been especially profound across Eastern Europe and Central Asia, where many inhabitants have themselves been the victims of Moscow’s aggression in the past.
In Kazakhstan, which shares the world’s longest land border with Putin’s rogue state and was the last of the former Soviet republics to achieve independence, the past two years have not only seen the disruption of traditional political and economic ties but accelerated a process of uncoupling from Russian language and culture.
Even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, “the young generation started to be more aware and be more awake and passionate about [Kazakh] culture itself,” says 26-year-old filmmaker Aisultan Seitov, whose feature debut, “Qas” (Hunger), about the brutal Kazakh famine of the 1930s, won best director honors in the Asian New Talent...
In Kazakhstan, which shares the world’s longest land border with Putin’s rogue state and was the last of the former Soviet republics to achieve independence, the past two years have not only seen the disruption of traditional political and economic ties but accelerated a process of uncoupling from Russian language and culture.
Even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, “the young generation started to be more aware and be more awake and passionate about [Kazakh] culture itself,” says 26-year-old filmmaker Aisultan Seitov, whose feature debut, “Qas” (Hunger), about the brutal Kazakh famine of the 1930s, won best director honors in the Asian New Talent...
- 12/11/2023
- by Christopher Vourlias
- Variety Film + TV
Exclusive: When Emmy-nominated EP Christian Beetz set out to explore the story of disgraced former Spanish King Juan Carlos I, he could never have imagined the “nightmare trip” that followed.
As Sky and NBCUniversal Global Distribution prepare to unveil Juan Carlos: Downfall of the King at Mip TV, Beetz revealed to Deadline that he believed he and his production team were being followed and their conversations listened to during the making of the four-parter last year.
“After doing our first round of interviews with journalists we got an anonymous call saying ‘Be careful what you’re doing here’,” he told us. “This was the start of a nightmare trip.”
Beetz believes his emails were being read and phone was being tapped, and his team started taking precautions, including placing their phones in the fridge – a move made famous by Nsa whistleblower Edward Snowden.
“When these things are happening you know...
As Sky and NBCUniversal Global Distribution prepare to unveil Juan Carlos: Downfall of the King at Mip TV, Beetz revealed to Deadline that he believed he and his production team were being followed and their conversations listened to during the making of the four-parter last year.
“After doing our first round of interviews with journalists we got an anonymous call saying ‘Be careful what you’re doing here’,” he told us. “This was the start of a nightmare trip.”
Beetz believes his emails were being read and phone was being tapped, and his team started taking precautions, including placing their phones in the fridge – a move made famous by Nsa whistleblower Edward Snowden.
“When these things are happening you know...
- 4/16/2023
- by Max Goldbart
- Deadline Film + TV
Oliver Stone’s 2021 documentary about Kazakhstan’s former authoritarian ruler, Nursultan Nazarbayev, reportedly received at least 5 million in funding from a charitable organization run by none other than Nazarbayev, according to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.
Qazaq: History of the Golden Man, directed by Igor Lopatonok, was released last year as both a feature film and an eight-hour miniseries. Stone produced the project and featured in it, interviewing Nazarbayev about his nearly 30-year reign in Kazakhstan, which began in 1991 and ended in 2019. The new report states that at...
Qazaq: History of the Golden Man, directed by Igor Lopatonok, was released last year as both a feature film and an eight-hour miniseries. Stone produced the project and featured in it, interviewing Nazarbayev about his nearly 30-year reign in Kazakhstan, which began in 1991 and ended in 2019. The new report states that at...
- 10/12/2022
- by Jon Blistein
- Rollingstone.com
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (let’s call it Borat) took the English-speaking comedy world by storm in 2006, wheezing throngs of critics and comedians declaring it nothing short of a revolution: at a rough-cut screening for Hollywood’s comedy intelligentsia, Simpsons writer George Meyer is said to have confided in Judd Apatow that it was like hearing the Beatles for the first time. Borat––Sacha Baron Cohen’s impossibly outrageous orientalist stereotype hailing from a fantastical Kazakhstan where women sleep in cages, antisemitic effigies are ritualistically beaten for sport, and a horse is treated like a man––mingled in unscripted interactions with a diverse cross-section of unsuspecting Americans ranging from politicians to rodeo-goers to aging TV starlets. The result was comic anarchy that nailed the peak reality-tv, early-YouTube, cynical late-Bush cultural zeitgeist. It was part Johnny Knoxville, part Andy Kaufman, all...
- 10/21/2020
- by Eli Friedberg
- The Film Stage
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