Have creators of Abel fled Belarus with $500,000?

The film, which was to become a response to “Long live Belarus” won’t come out perhaps.

The 7th congress of the Belarusian Union of Filmmakers has been held in Moskva cinema house in Minsk, which had not been convening for 5 years because of violation of the statute. The day before, on the request of the government, the Culture Ministry published a draft strategy of the cinema industry in Belarus for the next 5 years. The document has already been met with a mixed reaction, Radio Racyja informs.

More than 100 delegates gathered in the hall of the Treatre of Cinema Actor, which is situated in Moskva cinema house. They represented 337 members of the public association “The Belarusian Union of Filmmakers”. The Minister of Culture Barys Svyatlou, who came to the Congress, immediately noted that the situation in the Belarusian cinema is “the lowest of the low.”

“It was in sharp contrast to the huge cinema scandal of all-Belarusian scale concerning the film called Abel. It had been planned as an ideological response to the independent film “Long live Belarus”. The propaganda film with a second title “We are Brothers”, has not come out. The point of the scandal is the following: a so-called “Hollywood filmmaker”, who allegedly made the film, turned out to be a stunt performer from Lviv, Vitaly Vasilkov, and “a German actor” – a former Minsk clown.

The most interesting aspect of the scandal was it ending. These swindlers received $500,000 of state donations, and made off with the money in the United States,” told the journalist of the radio station Vitaly Syamashka.