What started as a drama about a Russian police plot to steal a billion dollars from a US financier and to murder his faithful tax lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, has become a real life investigation of contradicting versions of the crime. The Magnitsky Case is central for the policy of blacklisting bad guys from Putin’s Russia (“Magnitsky List”), which was then adopted by the West in retaliation for Russia’s actions in Ukraine.
Shockingly for the film’s director, dissident and Putin basher Andrei Nekrasov, the official Western story turns out to have serious flaws.
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A 2 hour 32 min version of THE MAGNITSKY ACT – BEHIND THE SCENES had its world premiere at an invitation-only screening at Filmens Hus in Oslo, Norway, on June 25th, 2016. Since then, the film has been shown (and awarded) at several international film festivals. Personal copies have also been sent to hundreds of journalists, politicians and others who have expressed interest in the film, given the film’s high-profile political content.
However, more than two years after its world premiere, the film has not yet been released to the general public. It has not been broadcast on TV, nor been screened at cinemas, released on DVD or made available online. Many dissatisfied members of the audience have asked Piraya Film why they cannot see the film.
The answer is that an attack campaign was launched by the British financier Bill Browder (who appears in the film) against the film and the filmmakers while the film was still under production. This campaign was backed by, among others, individuals in the US State Department, CIA, various think tanks and human rights organizations, and included smear tactics in the press and in various other settings. The campaign succeeded in blocking planned screenings at the European Parliament and at a Norwegian film festival. The film was partly financed by several TV stations, and normal procedure for a documentary would be that these TV stations broadcast the film first. However, the involved TV stations were subject to both political and legal pressure, and have, until this date, not published the film.