When I was a foreign correspondent, before joining Opinion, I met many activists who, at enormous personal risk, spoke out against injustice. Over time, their lives offered lessons in the hazards of following your moral compass. |
In 2002, I met a group of Belarusian dissidents in a Lithuanian forest, so they could speak safely. They were increasingly terrified about their eroding freedoms. Most have spent the past two decades in and out of prison. In 2011, I interviewed a young Bahraini woman, Zainab al-Khawaja, who publicly lambasted her government's quashing of her country's Arab Spring. She was arrested several times and eventually forced to flee Bahrain. In Angola in 2015, I met Rafael Marques de Morais, who was sentenced to jail for a gutsy anti-corruption crusade against the José Eduardo dos Santos regime. |
And then there was the 11-year-old schoolgirl I met in 2009 while I was living in Pakistan. Her name was Malala Yousafzai, and I made a documentary about her courage to speak out publicly against the Taliban. A few years later, she was shot. The bullet came within a few millimeters of killing her. |
Some of these activists grabbed the international spotlight and stayed there. But for every high-profile protester there is an untold number of people who have performed small but no less meaningful acts of righteousness that have gone mostly unheralded or were quickly forgotten. |
In March, soon after Russia invaded Ukraine, I asked our video team to explore the hypocrisy of the all-powerful Russian Orthodox Church, whose leader is a crony of Vladimir Putin. The Russian journalist Evgeny Babushkin, who was working with us, found out about a priest in a small Russian village who, in a burst of moral conviction, had done something really bold. In the eyes of the government, however, it was really bad. The priest had committed his egregious act before an audience of about 30 people, yet it has since upended his life. |
His story got only fleeting media coverage at the time and was largely lost in the storm of war-related news. So our team felt compelled to bring it to a wider audience. |
But there were serious production challenges. Filming in Russia is dangerous, especially in a small village where everyone knows everyone else. Many journalists there live in fear, and others live in jail. Also, we imagined the priest might be hesitant to tell us his story, fearing additional retribution. And how do you visualize a crime that wasn't documented by a camera, and when all eyewitnesses are too fearful to speak? |
But I strongly believe that some stories that don't lend themselves to video still deserve our attention. Kirk Semple, inspired by a few conversations with Father Ioann, proposed the idea of casting the priest's story as a morality tale. We made up for the absence of visual assets by animating several chapters. Two members of our team, Jonah Kessel and Alexander Stockton, directed creative approaches, including renting a church in Manhattan and a bar in Brooklyn to turn into film sets. Emily Holzknecht contracted a tailor in Ukraine to custom-make hand-sewn Russian Orthodox priest vestments, which play a prominent role in the film. |
And we invited Gary Shteyngart, a Soviet-born author of one of my favorite books, "Absurdistan," to narrate our film. We were drawn to Gary in part because he's an ace satirist who deploys humor as a form of biting social and political commentary. |
After watching the finished video, our collaborator Evgeny sent us a note. "I wrote my graduate work about tragic absurdity," he said. "Samuel Beckett and Buster Keaton were my heroes. And now the Russian state is a new incarnation of tragic absurdity. Sad story!" |
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