On the making of REBELLION: THE LITVINENKO CASE -
In Russia some people call me a traitor because of my ?positive? portrayal of the ex-spy Litvinenko who was subjected to an incredible three week long execution in London last November. I made a point of not replying to such accusations. Others, among them friends and colleagues, are wondering why my producer Olga Konskaya and I took the risk and trouble of infuriating our government if we used to make films about artists, composers and poets,about love and other beautiful things,and could have admittedly continued to do so. That wondering is genuine and therefore deserves an answer.    

When I, at the beginning of my active life, met Andrei Tarkovsky who was at the end of his, I thought I wanted to be like him: an uncompromising Artist, determined to express his acutely personal vision regardless of the dominating collectivist ideology and the collective of the ?Soviet People? in whose name he was accused of elitism and arrogance. Tarkovsky was not arrogant, but it was okay to be elitist, if it meant being on the wrong side of the totalitarian ideology. Tarkovsky died not to see those very masses of Soviet people voting overwhelmingly for Yeltsin who wanted to ban the communist party. Now after fifteen years of capitalism Russia is again the country of the rich and the poor, the boyars and the ?degraded and hurt?, best described by Dostoyevsky and Chekhov, it was before the 1917 revolution. And in this Russia it is not okay to be elitist, in my view at least. It?s not okay, for me at least, to be the pure apolitical artist because it feels like turning the blind eye to crime, that very ?Wegschauen? which has brought various forms of fascism to power time and time again throughout history. And as far as the Litvinenko affair goes turning the blind eye, for me, means cowardice. Because if your pal is killed, what do you do? You find out who did it, and go after them.

As for Tarkovsky, I take the liberty to suggest he would have been doing anti-fascist films today, something of a far cry from the pure art his comfy epigones turn out.