“At last they’ll be able to show something good about Russia,” says a handsome-looking press spokesman in the movie, as he prepares to give a US television crew a tour of the almost-finished sea bridge connecting the Crimean peninsula with Russia. Of course, the Americans let their hosts down, showing they are incapable even of praising this Russian achievement. “Just another Potemkin village,” they say, using the old Russian term for a fake.
The real interest in this film, though, lies in who is behind it: Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of the RT network, one of the pillars of the Kremlin’s international propaganda machine, who is now trying her hand at movie-making.
Four years since her ultimate boss, President Vladimir Putin, annexed Crimea from Ukraine, she has used the construction of the real-life, 11 mile-long road link connecting the peninsula to Russia as the backdrop for her first romantic comedy.
She wrote the screenplay. Her husband, Tigran Keosayan, directed it, and according to the BBC’s Russian website, they received at least 100 million rubles ($1.5 million) in funding from the Culture Ministry’s cinema foundation, without having to worry about any competition.
