Will understand who can. In Ottawa, a civil servant is invited to a party at the Russian Embassy, and everyone cries foul. Meanwhile, in Quebec City, a film festival invites one of Vladimir Putin’s greatest apologists… and everyone thinks it’s great!
Posted at 5:00 a.m.
The Quebec City Film Festival (FCVQ) has rolled out the red carpet for director Oliver Stone, criticized for having conducted a series of complacent interviews with Vladimir Poutine not so long ago. The FCVQ is proud of this great visit from Hollywood at a time when the master of the Kremlin is waging a bloody war in Ukraine.
Let’s put it like this: we’ve already seen better timing.
This Wednesday evening, the public is invited to hear the American director speak with former journalist Jean-François Lépine at Le Diamant, a “flagship event that will make the stars shine in the eyes of all moviegoers in the Capitale-Nationale “, promises the FCVQ. Admission price: from $67 to $96.
It’s expensive, I think, to hear this notorious conspirator say that the Ukrainians wanted him, that NATO provoked Putin and that Russia had to defend itself.
Expensive to hear Oliver Stone say that Vladimir Putin is a “rational, calm” man who has always acted “in the best interests of the Russian people”, as the director said again, at the end of April, in Barcelona.
If the public is lucky, they will hear the famous director note in passing, the air of nothing, that an impressive number of Ukrainians fought for Hitler during the Second World War…
A word of advice to moviegoers in Quebec City: as long as you pay that price to have pro-Kremlin propaganda served to you, go straight to the four hours of The Putin Interviews made by Stone in 2017. It’s free, on YouTube.
On Monday, FCVQ director Martin Genois served up the usual argument to the Sun : the work must be separated from the man. “We invite the director. This is what interests us above all. We are a cinema event. »
Martin Genois, however, said exactly the opposite to Radio-Canada, on April 20: “What interests us is to talk about cinema, but also about human beings. Beyond the film, we want to discover what animates him, what motivates him. »
Should connect: have we invited the director or the human?
The director has made great films. Without a doubt. Platoon, Wall Street, Born on the Fourth of July, The Doors…
But Oliver Stone hasn’t made these kinds of movies in ages. He took up documentaries – and specialized in admiring portraits of autocrats of all kinds, including Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez.
One of his most recent contributions to cinema is an eight (!) part interview series with Nursultan Nazarbayev, who prides himself on having imposed an “enlightened dictatorship” for 29 long years on the people of Kazakhstan.
In 2016, Oliver Stone also collaborated on Ukraine on Fire, very popular propaganda film in Russia, according to which the CIA orchestrated the Ukrainian revolution of 2014…
Knowing all this, how can we believe in the veracity of the “documentary” on the assassination of John F. Kennedy that the 75-year-old director came to present in Quebec?
JFK Revisited – Through the Looking Glass rehashes a threadbare plot. The film claims that, yes, yes, the Democratic president was assassinated by the CIA, backed by the US military-industrial complex. “Conspiracy theories are now conspiracy facts,” Stone slices in the trailer.
It’s funny, I wouldn’t bet my shirt on that.
If millions of Americans are now convinced that the CIA eliminated JFK, it is primarily because of a large disinformation operation carried out by the KGB, underlines the historian Tim Weiner in the magazine RollingStone.
But it is also, to a very large extent, because of one of the worst revisionist films in the history of cinema: JFK… by Oliver Stone (1991).
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“I am not for refusing to do interviews with people because they have done X or Y”, defended Jean-François Lépine at the Sun. Oliver Stone, he added, is a “victim of the current woke “.
No one is asking Mr. Lépine to cancel his interview. But you have to tell it like it is: tonight, he will face a personality who has made money by spreading unproven conspiracy theories and terribly toxic lies for decades.
A personality who does not hesitate to use all his influence to try to rehabilitate dictators, including Vladimir Putin. All this while Russian soldiers bomb cities and massacre civilians in Ukraine.
So yes, in the context, this “flagship event” may have something indecent.
And the current woke will have nothing to do with it.