By Anatoly Lemysh, The Day
The House of Film has hosted the first-night show of the Ukrainian 8-episode
detective television serial The Assault based on the novel by Svitlana
Zorina. It is based on a real-life story about the police and Security
Service (SBU) attempting to clamp down on a thriving Mezacred firm because
its management refused to pay bribes to a certain representative of those
who proudly call themselves law-enforcement bodies.
The film was made in a strictly documentary manner. The screen accurately
reproduces a submachine-wielding commando assault on a company office peopled
by defenseless women and the brutal destruction of equipment and premises
ostensibly in search of arms and drugs. Mrs. Zorina. a real-life company
director's wife and economist, has gone through searches with an attempt
to plant live ammunition, third-degree interrogations, and even pre-trial
custody.
Each of the novel and film characters have real-life prototypes. Actress
Anastasia Serdiuk, who played the heroine, even looks like her prototype,
Mrs. Zorina herself. One of the lawyers, who supported the firm in confronting
with police mayhem, had as a prototype Dmytro Dakhno, commercial manager
of the STB TV channel, who was assaulted and beaten in his apartment in
early March, as The Day's readers will recall. Involvement in the
Mezacred affair, as the former STB director Mykola Kniazhytsky admits,
may be one more version of that strange attack.
The documentary record of events sometimes contradicts the laws of art.
But, as the plot unravels, you understand that Mrs. Zorina's book and its
screen version made by STB under present conditions is a serious act of
civic courage by film director Lidia Kazberova who performs a detailed
autopsy on our rotten society, in which the state has become the main racketeer.







