Controversial Jewish Film Director’s St. Petersburg Studio Firebombed
(JTA) – Firebombs were hurled at the studio of a renowned Russian-Jewish film director who is reviled by some nationalists for his controversial depiction of the love affair between Russia’s last czar and a ballerina.
The firebombs hit the windows of Alexei Uchitel’s studio in St. Petersburg on Wednesday night, causing a fire that did not spread into the studio’s interior and was extinguished before it could cause serious damage to the building, RIA Novosti reported.
Uchitel, whose film “Matilda” about the extramarital love affair of Nicholas II and the ballet dancer Matilda Kshesinskaya is set to premiere in October, told the Russian news agency that he did not know who perpetrated the attack.
The film has prompted protests by many devout Christians and several groups representing them, the news site Jewish.ru reported. They complained that the steamy sex scenes featured in the film were immoral, and that the characterization of the relationship between the monarch and the ballerina was historically false as well as an insult to Russia’s national honor.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO