In this 2020 investigation, Alexei Navalny exposes the dark side of the making of the patriotic blockbuster The Crimean Bridge, directed by Tigran Keosayan from a screenplay by his wife, Margarita Simonyan. It turned out that 100 million rubles in state budget funds had been allocated to this “gift to Putin,” and nearly half of that was simply transferred by the propagandist family operation into their personal accounts, while the film’s secret sponsor was the bridge’s own builder, oligarch Arkady Rotenberg. While independent directors like Kirill Serebrennikov were being persecuted on fabricated charges, court parasites were receiving millions for the worst film of the year, helping the Kremlin lay the groundwork for resetting Putin’s presidential term limits.
Text version
0:00
Let's go, let's go.
0:13
Here we go.
0:17
We're driving with Vladimir Vladimirovich (Putin) across the
0:19
Crimean Bridge. It's quite a moment.
0:21
So solemn, in fact, that he even refused
0:22
to buckle up, even though he was asked several times to.
0:24
Let's not dwell on that.
0:28
He wouldn't even let someone ride with him in the cab.
0:30
Probably because he's so obsessed
0:32
with his bridge. In 20 years, nothing else has been built in the country,
0:34
but there really is a bridge.
0:37
And now it has turned into a 'spiritual staple' (a Russian propaganda term for traditional values) and the main
0:39
symbol. We've arrived. There's the construction site over there.
0:41
Even Margarita and Tigran are standing there,
0:43
ready for the big day, and we've prepared
0:44
to say: we are very, very proud of you, heroes.
0:48
Heroes of peacetime, heroes of the Crimean
0:52
Bridge. Sorry, guys, that we're here without
1:02
hard hats.
1:03
The main Putin construction project needs the main
1:05
Putin PR man. And the PR itself has to
1:08
be good enough for people to remember. Here,
1:10
some half-baked collaboration won't be enough.
1:12
What you need here is a big, beautiful film where there will be
1:16
both a bridge and love. You understand, it's
1:19
architectural... something grand like a Christmas tree.
1:25
There.
1:28
[music]
1:37
There.
1:39
There.
1:43
By now you've probably guessed that
1:45
you're watching the sequel to the film *Parasites*, in which
1:47
we talked about the most talentless
1:49
but terribly rich people — the married couple
1:52
Margarita Simonyan and Tigran Keosayan.
1:55
We deliberately chose not to include the work
1:57
of their creative tandem
1:58
on the Crimean Bridge in our first film,
2:01
because that one dealt with low genres —
2:03
television, advertising, PR — whereas this is real
2:07
art, made to delight the
2:10
highest leadership. The idea was
2:12
nothing less than
2:14
to immortalize the great feat of Vladimir
2:17
Putin, who built the bridge. This film, to me,
2:21
this continuation, is the realization of the
2:24
idea that was voiced. No one believed me in the West,
2:27
no one believed it in the West.
2:29
But it has been realized.
2:32
A truly tangible,
2:33
realized project.
2:35
Everything here is the realization of a dream.
2:38
The new film is super pathetic, like everything
2:42
the parasite couple makes. It simply
2:44
cannot be watched without an acute sense of
2:46
shame.
2:46
Agreed, but that's the last thing I'll say
2:49
about the artistic side. There are plenty of
2:51
excellent reviews of this creation online.
2:53
You'll get a lot of enjoyment from them.
2:55
Hatred, chauvinism, racism, without a drop of humor —
2:58
that's this film. But for those who want to know how people live and
3:01
that is a fact — after watching it,
3:04
we're going to do a review not of the creative side,
3:08
not the artistic one,
3:08
but the financial one, which is no less interesting and,
3:11
most importantly, super exclusive. After all, you've
3:14
heard many times about how money is stolen on terrible
3:17
films financed by
3:18
the state Film Fund. But how much
3:21
is stolen is unknown. And what fees actors
3:23
and directors get — we don't know. And how much does the script
3:26
cost? Who would ever tell us? But not
3:29
this time. Since the Anti-Corruption Foundation
3:31
decided to look into how Margarita Simonyan
3:33
does business, we obtained
3:35
the film's full accounting documentation.
3:37
And if we're talking about the Crimean Bridge,
3:40
I can tell you not only the actors' fees,
3:42
but also how much it cost to cover
3:44
this boat with special film
3:51
to make it look beautiful.
3:52
Pretty stars in the sky — beautiful.
3:55
Beautiful sky, beautiful scenery. And now we will find out exactly
4:00
whether the Simonyan-Keosayan couple decided
4:03
to steal even from something as sacred in their worldview
4:06
as a film about the Crimean Bridge. Or maybe
4:09
not. They may be crooks, but they do seem
4:11
to sincerely love Putin and his regime. Maybe
4:14
they were too embarrassed to take money from something holy.
4:22
Just not the 15th martini — to the hair...
4:28
A croissant... what service, what exactly...
4:33
She ordered a croissant. To begin with, let's
4:38
understand where the money for the film came from and
4:40
how much there was. Alas, we can see that
4:42
the Simonyan family did not invest their own money in the film,
4:44
even though, if there's one thing they do have, it's money.
4:47
As we established in the
4:49
*Parasites* investigation, they certainly have plenty. And really,
4:50
why invest your own when you can take
4:53
state money? So our heroes turned to
4:56
the Film Fund, a state organization
4:58
that supports the production
5:00
of national cinema. In other words, people come
5:03
to this organization and say:
5:05
we want to make a Russian film, give us
5:07
money. And they either get it or they don't.
5:10
No one understands exactly how these
5:12
decisions are made, but let me remind you that for many years
5:14
the key person making these decisions
5:17
was Culture Minister Vladimir
5:19
Medinsky, and we did an investigation
5:21
about him and found that this very
5:24
cultured man had a very nice
5:26
300-square-meter penthouse in central Moscow for
5:29
200 million rubles (about $3 million at the time).
5:30
The film *Crimean Bridge*, in fact,
5:33
is indeed socially significant.
5:35
Why? Because the Crimean Bridge is
5:37
a great engineering structure. The fact that
5:39
the film isn't about the bridge, or about love, and all that —
5:44
well, our people, generations of them,
5:48
have been thoroughly spoiled by Hollywood. Anyway,
5:54
Tigran Keosayan's studio and '8 Rows'
5:56
formally, for example, submitted
5:58
an application for Film Fund money and attached
6:01
a script by Margarita Simonyan.
6:03
And then a miracle happened — even a super-miracle.
6:05
the corrupt Cinema Fund that provides financing
6:08
A.G.
6:08
an equal number of monstrous films
6:11
rejected the application after reading the script
6:14
our parasites said, well no, this is
6:16
too... however, this isn't just
6:26
just a film, but a monument to the deeds
6:28
of the great boss, the boss, the boss
6:31
the boss... first of all, you have to
6:33
take the political angle into account
6:34
it doesn't matter that the script is awful; what matters is that
6:37
it says ideologically correct
6:39
things in it. Just look how far this went
6:42
and the First Deputy Chief of the Administration
6:44
of President Putin, Alexei Gromov
6:46
personally writes a letter to the Ministry of Culture in which he
6:49
demands that Simonyan be given 100 million rubles
6:52
without any of those competitions or selection procedures
6:54
and on top of that, as a non-repayable grant
6:57
against...
7:00
she couldn't resist. Now a question, dear
7:02
attentive viewers of our previous
7:04
investigation: do you remember whom Margarita
7:07
Simonyan paid more than 3 million rubles
7:09
rubles
7:10
by formally hiring him at her company?
7:12
That's right—to the son of that very same Gromov, and
7:15
his son also works at RT (Russia Today)
7:18
under Margarita Simonyan's supervision
7:20
This is just a perfect illustration
7:22
of top-tier parasitism. Do you have
7:26
a goal of making your money back? Well, broadly speaking,
7:28
there is no such big goal. Today she works
7:32
and lives on state budget money
7:34
she writes the script for her commercial
7:36
film, which will be directed by her husband
7:38
then she goes to the official Gromov, whose
7:40
salary we also pay, and Gromov
7:43
forces our Ministry of Culture
7:45
to gift her our own money. In other words, we
7:49
are literally paying salaries so that
7:52
they can steal from us. So, 100 million
7:55
is secured, filming can begin, but before
7:57
that, a film crew has to be assembled, and for
8:00
the filming of *The Crimean Bridge*
8:01
they put together a dream team: director Tigran
8:05
Keosayan
8:06
screenwriter Margarita Simonyan
8:09
Tigran Keosayan and David Keosayan
8:12
Laura, the wife of the son
8:15
of Tigran Keosayan's brother, and
8:18
Yunona Glotova. Besides the five people
8:20
listed in the opening credits, the film also involved
8:22
Alexandra Keosayan
8:25
second director Edmond
8:28
Keosayan
8:28
David's son, the line producer, and even
8:31
Alena Khmelnitskaya
8:33
Tigran Keosayan's ex-wife, and she
8:35
also appeared in this film—Alena
8:38
Khmelnitskaya
8:39
your wife Tigran, and when she read
8:41
the script, we were sitting somewhere drinking
8:43
wine, and she told me, 'I'm afraid of you, I'm
8:45
horrified,' simply after reading
8:46
the script, because of what is in your head
8:48
where did you get all this from? In other words, a big
8:51
happy family of parasites took 100
8:54
million rubles from us and went to Crimea to shoot a movie
8:57
Personally, it seems to me that *The Crimean Bridge* is
9:00
simply a family contract for your family and
9:02
your relatives, but I won't answer for that; I
9:04
was simply lucky—I have a great many
9:06
talented people in my family
9:08
in general, working as a family from the start
9:11
is probably more convenient. Any film begins
9:14
with a script, and ours, as we know, was written by
9:17
Margarita Simonyan
9:18
a very busy person. According to her
9:20
husband, Margarita wrote the script over two or three
9:22
months as a hobby, strictly in her free time
9:26
in the evenings, because during the day she is in public service, and
9:30
it seems I know what you want—and how much
9:37
will she charge all of us for a script
9:40
written by a state employee in the evenings
9:42
as a hobby, considering what came out
9:45
like this now
9:47
you close the class
9:51
[music]
9:54
so anyway
9:55
speaking of corruption, sorry that we didn't
10:05
do this earlier to assess whether this is a lot or a little
10:08
they'll ask Margarita. We go online
10:10
to find out how much a script generally costs
10:12
and we see that the screenwriter of very
10:15
successful Russian films like *Legend
10:17
No. 17* and *Going Vertical* asks for up to
10:19
6 million rubles for a script. Now over to
10:22
Margarita
10:23
I enjoy doing it, and on top of that
10:25
they even pay me for it—and they pay very
10:27
well
10:27
9 million rubles—that is exactly how much from
10:31
the Cinema Fund's money was transferred to the personal
10:33
account of Margarita Simonyan
10:35
the state propagandist from the channel
10:36
RT (Russia Today), for the script of a film that
10:39
she wrote in the evenings as a hobby
10:42
how much time... before
10:45
it... maybe three, perhaps even more
10:47
because of course, first of all
10:50
I don't want the workload to interfere with my job
10:54
that's why hobbies must not interfere with one's main
10:57
work, so I somehow carved out the time, and
10:59
it took a long time
11:10
It wasn't for nothing that I ended up in the saddest scene
11:13
of the film, yes, because there is sadness in my soul
11:16
How could this be, Margarita Semyonovna?
11:18
You said you wrote the script as a gift, and yet
11:21
in the end you sold us that 'gift' for 9
11:24
million rubles. How could that be? We thought
11:28
it was your pleasure, something you enjoyed doing when you came home
11:31
to scribble a few lines for the soul. There were 100
11:40
million rubles, and 10 percent was immediately skimmed off
11:43
for Margo
11:44
Well, maybe then her husband worked
11:46
for free—he really does love
11:48
the Guarantor (a common Russian euphemism for the president)
11:49
Shiva will reset his terms; the KamAZ truck in which
11:52
Putin rode across the Crimean Bridge would have won
11:54
in a competition even without a driver, alas.
11:56
No, in those same days, regarding Tigran Keosayan,
11:59
14 million rubles (about $220,000 at the time) were paid out via Sberbank for
12:02
the services of the director and music
12:05
producer. The film’s second director
12:07
is Tigran’s 23-year-old daughter,
12:10
Alexandra Keosayan.
12:11
While her peers from
12:13
film directing departments work on set
12:14
for food and experience, Alexandra, for a couple of
12:17
months of shooting, receives more than 4
12:20
million rubles. Now that’s what you call
12:22
good parents. The state’s 100
12:26
million rubles are melting away before our eyes, but
12:28
the parasites still want more. 8 million
12:31
rubles go to David Keosayan, Tigran’s brother,
12:34
and he, in turn,
12:36
though he supposedly cannot work on a serious
12:38
film alone, took on two people from his own system:
12:41
his own son Edmond, who was paid
12:43
4 million rubles, and his son’s wife,
12:45
Yunona Glotova, with a fee of 6.1
12:49
million rubles. The total amount
12:52
that went to the personal accounts of members
12:54
of this parasitic family is 46 million rubles.
12:56
That is, half of all the money
12:59
that the state, without any tender and on the basis of
13:01
a special letter, allocated for a film about
13:04
the sacred Crimean Bridge, the parasites simply
13:07
took for themselves, without any complicated
13:10
corruption scheme: they just transferred it
13:12
to their accounts.
13:19
And then the question arises: almost nothing
13:22
is left. What about the actors? We thought
13:25
the amazing world of cinema was built on
13:27
stars with enormous fees,
13:30
and absurd whims,
13:32
and that the lion’s share of the budget goes to them.
13:34
Or does it?
13:35
Alas, the film’s honest bookkeeping
13:38
paints a picture far less glamorous than
13:41
the glossy magazines do.
13:42
Ekaterina Shpitsa, who played the lead
13:44
archetype, received 1.8 million
13:48
rubles in fees, and her partner received 1 million
13:50
251 thousand rubles.
13:52
The mustachioed misogynist got 1 million 300
13:55
29 thousand rubles. The sad
13:58
grandfather, Damir Nadirovich, cost 881
14:01
thousand rubles. How is all this
14:03
possible? The fake Caucasian, Dmitry
14:05
Kartashov, received 501
14:07
thousand rubles for the film, while the well-known comedian Yuri
14:09
Stoyanov
14:10
disgraced his gray hair by appearing in this
14:12
film for 628 thousand
14:15
rubles.
14:16
[music]
14:21
USA
14:21
[music]
14:23
All the actors together, including the leads and
14:26
supporting roles, received 10 million
14:29
rubles among 14 people—less than a single
14:33
Tigran Keosayan.
14:34
About the same as Margarita
14:36
Simonyan received for the screenplay, which she wrote over 3
14:39
months in the evenings as a hobby. That’s just
14:42
how it is. “How was it working?” One of them for some reason doesn’t want
14:46
to answer the question. That’s how it is:
14:49
this isn’t Hollywood here—the more you love
14:51
the president,
14:52
the fatter your fee. People have seen this
14:55
before: we hadn’t even started filming yet, and we had already
14:57
spent almost all the money. And still ahead were
14:59
still ahead:
15:00
shooting, cameras, editing, graphics, equipment—
15:03
all of that also had to be paid for.
15:05
We isolated and analyzed every
15:07
money transfer connected with the making of
15:09
this film and came across an obvious
15:12
discrepancy: the budget allocated by the Cinema Fund
15:15
was not enough. And then came the time for
15:20
the secret sponsor. Our parasites
15:22
understood that, given their appetites,
15:24
the state money would not be enough.
15:25
They asked for support—and got it.
15:27
Only they didn’t merely hide their generous patron;
15:30
they hid him,
15:30
they outright lied about it.
15:33
In the documents, we see 54
15:35
million rubles arriving in the account of Keosayan’s studio
15:37
in the form of a grant for the development of
15:40
culture from the Foundation for the Development of
15:43
Cinematography, Education, and Culture. From the name, it sounds like
15:46
some kind of
15:47
solid foundation supporting
15:49
cinema, just as the Cinema Fund does,
15:51
but that is not the case. In the Foundation for the Development of
15:53
Cinematography, Education, and Culture,
15:55
only one person works. The foundation
15:57
is registered in a prefab apartment block in
15:59
Mitino (a district of Moscow), and in all its existence since
16:02
2013 it had neither received nor spent
16:04
a single kopeck on anything at all—not on
16:07
cinema, not on anything else related to
16:09
culture.
16:10
Except in 2017, when from nowhere
16:14
54 million rubles appeared in the foundation’s account,
16:17
which the foundation immediately transferred to
16:20
Keosayan’s studio. And where did those 54
16:24
million in this front foundation come from? They were transferred there
16:26
personally by Arkady Romanovich
16:30
Rotenberg—the very same Rotenberg whose company
16:32
built the Crimean Bridge, the very one
16:33
in question.
16:34
Rotenberg, whose involvement in the film
16:36
was categorically denied by these parasites—
16:39
by Keosayan and Simonyan.
16:42
Someone was supporting them.
16:43
And the very same people who arranged
16:45
it—did they support this film or not? We have
16:47
the group saying, “We were supported by the Cinema Fund.”
16:50
Even Rotenberg’s own official representative
16:52
stated unequivocally: “We did not provide financial
16:55
assistance to the film.”
16:57
The final financial breakdown with
16:59
taking into account the money of Putin's other Thunberg
17:01
it looks like some relatively
17:03
substantial money was spent on
17:04
computer graphics and equipment rental
17:06
the rest is far less
17:08
significant, and any, any expenses on
17:11
the film simply pale in comparison with
17:14
the fees of these parasites — they get 30
17:17
percent of the film's total budget, and do you
17:20
remember what a pompous premiere it was
17:22
nationwide coverage, people from the Kremlin, everyone
17:25
was wildly enthusiastic, and all thanks to
17:27
Margarita and Tigran, well, because this is
17:29
supposedly patronage, a very good deed
17:31
and
17:32
comrades who made a film for you
17:35
made it
17:37
third, the topic of the Crimean Bridge — this is a topic
17:39
that concerns the whole country
17:41
we haven't had such truly
17:44
successful construction projects in a long time, and so the way he
17:47
translated it, so to speak, into the language of cinema
17:51
could be interesting, and then since this is
17:53
Keosayan, it was supposed to be funny. The latest
17:55
examples
17:55
of Russian military products are classified in
17:57
NATO classification under the code name "Don't
18:01
Be Ridiculous" — people simply mocked it
18:02
the patriots spent their time, did the work
18:05
didn't take a kopeck from us and gave us
18:08
a wonderful film that we will all
18:10
rewatch, and whose jokes we will
18:12
quote in conversation, just
18:14
as we do with *The Diamond Arm* or
18:16
*Ivan Vasilievich Changes Professions* — those were the reference points for me
18:19
sort of benchmarks: *Girls*,
18:22
*Altitude*, *Boots...* *Sandals...*
18:26
this one seems to be mine
18:33
the idiot didn't get it
18:38
looks like this is my favorite yoga pose for
18:46
on watermelons, and just yesterday I was called from
18:49
excitingly striped... what a mess this is
18:52
and what did we get? The worst film of 2018
18:56
which will now be remembered only for the fact that
18:58
an especially large amount was stolen from it, and
19:01
Putin's entourage stole the budget for a gift
19:05
to Putin
19:06
frankly, even I found it rather unpleasant
19:08
it's surprising — we interact with them and
19:11
whether we agree or disagree, we think they are decent
19:13
people, but this is directly harmful, and you know, that harm
19:17
is sad. Should Simonyan and Keosayan
19:21
face consequences and then end up in court for
19:24
this embezzlement? Absolutely. Let's compare it with
19:27
the case of director Kirill Serebrennikov
19:29
a very high-profile case; it was
19:30
mentioned repeatedly by Putin himself, and in
19:32
the general view it is completely
19:34
fabricated. As for
19:36
Serebrennikov, you know, you know
19:39
perfectly well that if this had been
19:40
a real investigation rather than persecution, his
19:43
play would not have been staged at the
19:45
Bolshoi Theatre, yet it was. One of the
19:48
accusations against the defendants in the case
19:49
is that they took two
19:51
million rubles in state subsidies
19:52
for a play
19:53
but did not stage it, even though the play is
19:56
in the theater's repertoire. And Serebrennikov has
19:58
no huge country houses,
20:00
no Cadillacs, no bank accounts with
20:03
impressive sums in them. Nevertheless, he
20:05
had searches carried out at his home
20:06
he was under house arrest, and now all
20:08
the defendants are awaiting trial and sentencing
20:10
while here, Putin's patriots receive 100
20:14
million rubles from the Cinema Fund and take
20:16
half for themselves and make the worst film
20:19
of the year. We were really rooting for this
20:22
really rooting for it. Meanwhile, with
20:24
Serebrennikov, by the way, it's impossible to buy
20:26
tickets to his productions — they're always sold out
20:28
but he got raids and an expensive investigation
20:32
and here you have the parasites' 900-square-meter house
20:35
located in the Knyazhye Ozero settlement on
20:37
Novorizhskoye Highway
20:38
come here too — searches, seizures, interrogations
20:42
black masks, everything you like. Here is
20:44
real corruption and one-hundred-percent
20:47
proof. Do you think they'll come?
20:50
No, because in Russia the parasites are in power
20:53
Simonyan and Keosayan matter because, first,
20:56
they steal, and second, they are now helping Putin
20:59
reset his presidential term limits and carry out
21:01
his fraudulent vote on
21:03
the illegal constitutional amendments
21:05
they are helping United Russia in the coming
21:07
September win again in the elections to
21:10
regional parliaments, and when United
21:13
Russia wins again, Simonyan and Keosayan will
21:15
once again get access to the budget in order to
21:19
once again
21:19
rob us
21:21
[music]
21:29
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21:32
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21:34
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21:37
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21:39
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21:41
[music]
21:50
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21:53
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