Word: film
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Washington-backed President Mikheil Saakashvili, who has a law degree from New York's Columbia University, has been relentless in spinning the war as a product of Russian expansionism. He gave dozens of interviews to Western media even as the bombs were falling, and says that the upcoming film with Garcia will drive that point further. "Indeed right now the American director is producing a Hollywood film, and I am sure Russia is not depicted there in the best light," he told a gathering of supporters in Kiev, Ukraine, this month. "It's true Andy Garcia's previous role...
...Saakashvili said the big-budget film was not financed by the Georgian government. "We have enough trouble funding our local directors," he said at the Ukraine gathering, which TIME attended. But the author of the screenplay, David Imedashvili, tells TIME that the initial funding for the project came from a Georgian government fund. Projects like this, he said, give Georgia a rare chance to hit back at its bullying northern neighbor. "Georgia is a very small country, Russia is a giant," Imedashvili says. "It's idiotic to fight a war with Russia, but we have to do something. We have...
...people of South Ossetia, a separatist region that Russia says it was forced to step in to protect. But the project fell flat. Narrated by Canadian George Watts - a former translator for Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin - its arguments seemed heavy-handed even to sympathetic critics, and the whole film has been viewed on YouTube - in either its Russian or its English versions - fewer than 12,000 times...
...Much like his Georgian counterparts, the film's director, Igor Voloshin, insists that his work is a historical document as much as a work of art. "This film gives a very objective point of view," Voloshin tells TIME. "On the one hand it is a feature film, a work of art, but from the point of view of history, we did not lie." When asked where he had found objective truth in the muddied waters of the conflict, Voloshin said he did not need to prove anything. "Time will show who is right," he says...
...just in case, Russia is looking to make another movie to shore up its version of the conflict. Renowned Serbian director Emir Kusturica declined the project last month following a meeting with its Russian backers in a Moscow nightclub. But don't be surprised if those behind the film sign someone else up and Russian moviegoers soon get yet another take on a familiar subject...