Orthodox activists launch crusade against film ‘blasphemy’

RUSSIA: It was supposed to be a patriotic costume drama showing the human side of a monarch who ultimately chose duty over love.

Instead, a new state-backed film about Nicholas II, the last tsar of Russia, has become a flashpoint in this increasingly conservative country, sparking firebombings and a campaign of threats by religious activists.

Partly financed by the culture ministry, Matilda presents a dramatised and richly visualised account of Nicholas II’s romance with the Polish ballerina Matilda Kshesinskaya.

Their illicit love threatens his planned marriage to Princess Alix of Hesse, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria.

It sounds like the perfect fodder for a box office smash.

But Nicholas II - who was forced to abdicate before he and his family were eventually shot by the Bolsheviks - was sainted by the Russian Orthodox Church in 2000.

The racy depiction of his fling has drawn a violent backlash from religious activists. Russia’s largest cinema chain has said it won’t screen the movie because of safety concerns.

‘‘The existing mess over the film was made by people who haven’t seen it, it’s a soap bubble,’’ Alexei Uchitel, the filmmaker who directed Matilda, told The Sunday Telegraph.

‘‘I’m ready for a broad discussion, but only when people watch it.

‘‘Before that it’s absurd.’’ Bishop Tikhon Shevkunov, long rumoured to be Vladimir Putin’s confessor, said the film was a ‘‘distortion of history’’ that defamed Nicholas II, who is played by a German actor.

Natalya Poklonskaya, a ruling party MP and former prosecutor general of Crimea, has been clamouring to ban the picture, calling it a ‘‘desecration of the Orthodox faith’’.

Uchitel said her war of words had helped incite the attacks and threats against him and others. ‘‘Maybe she didn’t realise it would start a crusade, but it happened nonetheless,’’ he said.

The row exemplifies a broader crackdown in Russia that harks back to the tsarist era the film depicts, when the state ideology was ‘‘Orthodoxy, autocracy, nationality’’.

Poklonskaya has argued that the film violates a blasphemy law signed by Putin in 2013, alongside legislation against gay propaganda.

When asked about the Matilda controversy in June, Putin would only say arguments over the film should be kept ‘‘within the law’’. But there are signs that even the government now feels it may have lost control of the debate.

- Telegraph Group