Hi, everyone and welcome. Today I am joined by Alexander Mercuris and Andrei Necrassov, a world-renowned

film director, who has made many excellent films, including the 2016 film, The Magnitsky Act.

And, yeah, our topic today is more or less narrative control in which films such as the Magnitsky Act, I would argue, is quite relevant in terms of development of narratives, narratives which lay the foundations for very severe sanctions, but also what happens when you challenge the narrative, as we have seen.

So some of the things we'll discuss is what was the narrative sold to push the Magnitsky Act versus reality,

and also what happened to the documentary of Nekrasov on the Magnitsky Act,

as this is quite troubling censorship.

And, yeah, Mr. Nacroosov, you, I guess you found yourself in a strange position

as you initially, of course, very sympathetic, of course, to the passing of Zergei Magnitsky,

still, I assume, but you became very critical of the Magnitsky case and

to many people this might have seen strange as you were I guess well known for producing many

films critical of the Kremlin but in these days when everything is binary support our

narrative or theirs,

many would see them looking for suspicious motivations, I guess, but, well, I guess from my

perspective, reality should be objective on its own.

So I guess your documentary about Magnitsky was initially based to a large extent on the story told by Bill Browder.

However, once you delved into this, it became more critical.

So I guess, yeah, well, I was hoping you could maybe start off with a bit overview of how you approach this documentary.

Yeah. Thank you. Well, a bit of a background is that I was quite active in what's called Russian opposition.

Of course, opposition is, in some ways, is a misnomer

because opposition in the UK and other democracies is,

you know, we talk of parliamentary opposition, whereas in Russia, in Russia, we, I was a member of

some groups, organizations, which were, I'd call them civil society groups, because there's an opposition in the Duma,

...