The film is directed by Vitalijs Manskis and its national premiere will take place on August 26 in Riga, at the Splendid Palace cinema.
In the coming weeks, more than 4,000 members of the European Film Academy will judge and vote on the selected films. The finalists will be announced on 9 November 2021 at the European Film Festival in Seville, Spain, and the European Film Academy Awards will take place on 11 December in Berlin.
The world premiere of “Gorbachev. Paradise” took place in 2020 at the IDFA Documentary Film Festival, where he won the award for best feature film. The film has been praised and screened at several international festivals – Tallinn Black Nights (Estonia), Hong Kong IFF, CPH: DOX (Denmark), Visions du Réel (Switzerland), DOK.fest Munich (Germany), DocsBarcelona (Spain), “Sheffield Doc / Fest” (Great Britain), “It’s all true IDFF” (Brazil), etc. It is already known that the film will be shown in cinemas in the Balkans, USA and Canada. also TV channels BBC (Great Britain), NHK (Japan), “Al Jazeera” (Asia).
The film tells the story of a man whose changes changed the world. He was an architect of openness (Glasnostj) and reconstruction (Perestroika), he demolished the Berlin Wall. But he also kept quiet about the Chernobyl accident, he suppressed protesters in Tbilisi and Baku. The Soviet empire collapsed during his reign, and the people themselves now condemn him for it. With the burden of past events on his shoulders, a lonely man spends his days in an empty house in the suburbs of Moscow.
Director Vitaly Manski says of his film: “Mikhail Gorbachev will one day have monuments around the world. Somewhere very soon, somewhere – like Russia – it will be many years before there is any idea of what this man has done. But I wanted behind the coolness of bronze or marble would be seen a man who wanted to make the world a better place.
The national premiere of the film will take place on August 26 in Riga, at the Splendid Palace cinema. From August 27, the film will be shown in Riga, Talsi, Liepaja, Cesis and elsewhere.
The film “Gorbachev. Paradise” is a co-production of the studios “Vertov” (Latvia) and “Hypermarket Films” (Czech Republic). The Latvian side of the film’s creative team is represented by sound director Anrijs Krenbergs, composer Kārlis Auzāns, editing director Jevgēņijs Ribalko, also director Vitalijs Manskis and producer Natālija Manska. The film was made in collaboration with Czech television and TV channels “Arte” and “Настоящее время”. The film was financially supported by the National Film Center and the Czech Film Foundation.
