You can now watch an English version of the documentary “The Murder of Gongadze: 20 Years of Searching for the truth.” According to the producer of the documentary, Nataliya Gumenyuk. “This movie is, for anybody who wants to understand why Ukraine is what it is now.”
Ukraine is a complex country, spanning more than 1,200 kilometers from East to West and with around 40 million inhabitants and several ethnic groups. The country holds great economic and social possibilities but the country also has several problems, which it is trying to address such as corruption, its judiciary and press freedom.
An English-language documentary named “The Murder of Gongadze: 20 Years of Searching for the Truth” aims to explain Ukraine today through the killing of journalist Georgiy Gongadze, the co-founder of the media Ukrainska Pravda. The killing happened back in 2000 after the troublesome 1990s in Ukraine, often compared to the Wild West.
“This movie is, for anybody who wants to understand why Ukraine is what it is now, but it is also universal as it explains why journalism matters. Yet on this day, I do not just want to be pessimistic. Whilst the justice system continued to fail, it was Ukrainian journalists themselves who shone the light on this case and made a cover-up impossible. So while this is a tragedy, it is also a story of resilience and why lessons of the past matter,” says the producer of the documentary, Nataliya Gumenyuk, according to Kyiv Post.
You can see the documentary below.
The English version of the documentary is released on World Press Freedom Day on May 3rd and is a film by Ukrainian journalists Nataliya Gumenyuk, Maxim Kamenev, and Anna Tsyhyma. It explains the murder of Georgiy Gongadze but tries to go a step deeper to look at the Ukrainian society back in the 1990s.
“The story of the murder of Georgiy Gongadze provides an understanding of the context in which the current generation of Ukrainians was formed, their distrust of the government, and the formation of the civil society that journalists were part of. It was active citizens who actually forced the authorities to punish the journalist’s killer,” says co-author Maxim Kamenev.
Gongadzes killers were prosecuted and sentenced, but it is still unclear today, who was behind the ordering of the killing. Many believe that former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma played a role in the killing, but it has not been proven.
