OREANDA-NEWS The Artdokfest International Documentary Film Festival will no longer be held in Russia. The directorate of the event, which has been held in the country annually since 2007, announced this in a statement on the official website.

According to the organizers of the festival, the decision was made against the background of the disruption of the opening ceremony of the festival in the cinema «October» in Moscow on March 31. Half an hour before the event, the police received a message about the mining of the building, and employees began mass evacuation of spectators, after which the cinema was closed.

«And now it doesn't matter whether the cancellation of the festival occurred as a result of a call about the building being mined or the pressure of the authorities on the cinema network — the festival was destroyed by the totality of everything that is happening in the Russian Federation. What happened convinces us that the conditions we accepted for the sake of preserving the Artdokfest in Russia were meaningless. A cultural event that has as its main principle fidelity to reality cannot and should not exist in the circumstances of the triumph of false mythology and the prohibition of the truth», the statement said.

Also, before the evacuation, the festival director Vitaly Mansky was attacked at the entrance to the October cinema — an unknown man doused him with red paint.

The event was established in 2007 on the initiative of the Council of the national award in the field of non-fiction cinema Laurel Branch. This year, the Artdokfest was to be held in Moscow from March 31 to April 7.