Babitsky's War

Sarah Jordan, an American living in London in 1984, is married to the son of a wealthy British industrialist. She encounters Nick Callahan, a renegade doctor, whose impassioned plea for help to support his relief efforts in war-torn Africa moves her deeply. As a result, Sarah embarks upon a journey of discovery that leads to danger, heartbreak and romance in the far corners of the world.

Two Russian soldiers, one battle-seasoned and the other barely into his boots and uniform, are taken prisoner by an anxious Islamic father from a remote village hoping to trade them for his captured son.

During the bloody war in Chechnya, a British couple and two Russian soldiers are taken hostage by Chechen rebels. Two of the hostages are then released to bring the money for the British woman who is forced to wait for the ransom.

This is a story about the battle for a hospital building in Grozny (Chechnya) in January 1995 between Russian Army forces and Chechen rebels supported by Arabian mujahideen and international mercenaries. Although the story is fictional, most of the characters are based on real-life prototypes and events are the compilation of true events during the Grozny Siege in the First Chechen War.

They’ve become the human face of inhuman barbarity. Leaders like Hitler, Idi Amin Dada, Stalin, Kim Jong Il, Saddam Hussein, Nicolae Ceausescu, Bokassa, Muammar Kadhafi, Khomeini, Mussolini and Franco governed their countries completely cut off from reality. These paranoid leaders were driven to abuse their power by the pathology of power itself. Dictators are driven by a relentless, thought-out determination to impose themselves as infallible, all-knowing and all-powerful beings. But they are also men ruled by their caprices, uncontrollable impulses, and reckless fits of frenzy, which paradoxically render them as human as anyone else. The abuses they committed were clearly atrocious, yet some of them were as outlandish as the characters portrayed in the film The Dictator. They sunk to depths worthy of Kafka: so incredibly absurd, they are outrageously funny.

Georgia, 1864. The Tsarist regime is using Cossacks to forcibly resettle Muslim Georgians to Turkey in order to steal their land. Meanwhile a Muslim girl falls in love with a Christian from the next village.

As Russian tanks advance over the plains of Chechnya, a group of Russian mothers search for the sons, conscripts from the ill-fated 131st Brigade, they believe have been captured by the Chechens. They place their trust in Colonel Kosov, a Russian liaison officer responsible for organising prisoner exchanges across the front line.

“While shooting my feature documentary film, Memory, in April of 2021 in Grozny, Chechnya (the birthplace of my mother and where I grew up), I felt the influence of the gigantic portraits of Putin, Kadyrov Senior and Kadyrov Junior all over the city. They observed me from everywhere. In parallel to the production of the film, we set out to capture the feeling of totalitarianism that these portraits conveyed. We got up at 4 in the morning and shot through the window of a car because such actions put us under threat of persecution. We understood that we were documenting the time of the birth of fascism in Russia.” Vladlena Sandu

Short documentary about Russian special forces during the Third Battle of Grozny during the First Chechen War

Alexander Nevzorov's documentary of the storming of Grozny in 1994-95