New East Digital Archive

Perfectly-timed power cut halts Nemtsov documentary screening

28 February 2017

Yesterday a power outage in the Russian city of Saratov, a major port on the Volga River, arrived just in time to stop a special presentation of a documentary about assassinated opposition leader Boris Nemtsov.

The Man Who Was Too Free, directed by Vera Krichevskaya, was about to begin when the lights suddenly went out.

According to a report by local news site Svobodnye Novosti, the power cut affected not just the cinema, but all buildings on Sarato’s Oktyabrskaya Street.

Although a cinema employee stated that Saratov’s power supplier put the outage down to “an internal malfunction”, local news has reported an intriguing twist in the tale. A man claiming to be an official at the local branch of the Russian Culture Ministry had allegedly phoned the cinema earlier in the day to find out about screening times — could there be more to this story than (un)fortunate timing?

Sunday marked two years since opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was gunned down outside the Kremlin.

Source: The Moscow Times