Ukraine’s state cinema agency, Goskino, has banned two more Russian features, Match and August. Eighth, on top of several other movies and television series banned over the last few months, accusing them of being “Russian propaganda.”
“These two movies are blatant examples of contemporary Russian propaganda, aimed not only against the Ukrainian people, but also against other peoples, including Georgians,” the agency said in a statement.
Read more Two Russian Films Banned in Ukraine
Match, released in 2012 and directed by Andrei Malyukov, is centered on a soccer game that took place back in 1942 in Kiev, occupied by Nazi troops, between a German team and the local squad Dynamo. Dynamo won the game, which was later dubbed “the match of death,” as several of its players were subsequently executed or sent to concentration camps.
Although the film’s creators insisted that they accurately recreated the event, on which the movie was based, Ukrainian film officials were apparently unhappy with the way Ukrainians were shown.
The other recently banned film, Dzhanik Fayziyev‘s August. Eighth, also released in 2012, technically has nothing to do with Ukraine. However, it is focused on a brief military conflict between Russia and Georgia back in 2008, to which the current crisis in relations between Russia and Ukraine is often compared. Incidentally, the film was already banned in Ukraine at the time of its release, but the ban was later lifted.
Previously, Ukrainian authorities already banned several Russian films and TV series, including White Guard, based on the novel by Mikhail Bulgakov, and the crime TV series Cop Wars.
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