Dear Friends,
As you might have learned from the media, the Russian prosecution is now calling for a 23-year sentence for the Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov, although the key witness has retracted his testimony as given “under duress”.
On an initiative by the EFA Board another letter has been sent to the Russian authorities asking for Oleg’s immediate release. The Polish Film Academy has re-sent this letter to its members and has now sent it, with a long list of Polish names underneath, to Russia as well. The German, the Austrian and the Czech Film Academies have just done the same, and so, we hope, will many others.
It would be great if you could join and add your name to the list of supporters before the verdict which is expected for Tuesday, 25 August!
You can either put your name below the letter (alone or with any group of friends or colleagues you can motivate) and send it by fax to the contacts below – the more faxes they get, the better. Or you send an e-mail to p.edelmann(at)europeanfilmacademy.org to add your name to the list of supporters on our website. Or both.
Thank you very much for your attention and kind regards from Berlin,
Your EFA Secretariat
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Here is the letter to support by faxing directly or by sending us an e-mail:
URGENT: FREE OLEG SENTSOV! PLEASE ADD YOUR NAME TO THE EFA LETTER!
In the light of the latest proceedings in the case of the Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov and the fact that the prosecution is now calling for a 23-year sentence, we wish to support the initiative of the European Film Academy:
To
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin – President of Russia
Sergey Evgenyevich Naryshkin – Chairman of the State Duma of the Russian Federation
Aleksandr Vasilievich Bortnikov – Director of the FSB
Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kolokoltsev – Russian Minister of Internal Affairs
Yuriy Yakovlevich Chaika – Prosecutor General
From the moment when we learned that the Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov was arrested by the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB) in his house in Simferopol on 11 May 2014, we have been deeply worried. We have followed the proceedings from a trial repeatedly being postponed until over one year later when it finally opened in Rostov-on-Don. Having observed the trial and especially the fact that the key witness for the prosecution has retracted his testimony as “given under pressure and duress”, we are shocked that the accusation of Oleg Sentsov having committed “crimes of a terrorist nature” is still being upheld.
In the light of these circumstances, we respectfully call upon you
• to ensure the safety of Oleg Sentsov;
• to have the charges dropped due to insufficient evidence;
• to have the detained released immediately and unconditionally;
• to ensure complete rehabilitation of the detained;
• to instigate a full, prompt and impartial investigation into the apparently arbitrary detention by the FSB and Oleg Sentsov’s statements about torture in order to bring all those responsible to justice.
Yours faithfully,
Stephen Daldry, director, UK
Mike Downey, producer, UK
Agnieszka Holland, director, Poland
Dariusz Jablonski, producer, Poland
Aki Kaurismäki, director, Finland
Mike Leigh, director, UK
Ken Loach, director, UK
Wojciech Marczewski, director, Poland
Daniel Olbrychski, actor, Poland
Volker Schlöndorff, director, Germany
Béla Tarr, director, Hungary
Bertrand Tavernier, director, France
Andrzej Wajda, director, Poland
Wim Wenders, director, Germany
Krzysztof Zanussi, director, Poland
