Award-winning documentary VIDEO

GRIGORY TISHIN (20) after his release from prison (3 years !)

             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."

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