"The Circle": Arson attack and harassment in Kiev

As the Molodist film festival points out Facebook writes, more than a dozen masked men from the Right Front stormed the Cinema Panorama in Kiev at 5.40 p.m. on Friday and once again disrupted a screening of "Sunny Bunny". "Sunny Bunny" is the section of the festival that shows films with gay, lesbian and transgender content. The men chanted slogans such as "This movie is immoral and therefore forbidden" and behaved aggressively towards audience members. Before people were physically injured, the festival organizers were able to evacuate the audience through the back door.

Michael Stütz, jury member of the "Sunny Bunny" competition at the Molodist International Film Festival, had a stroke of luck: "I wasn't there yesterday because I had already seen the film, but I was in the car on the way there because I was supposed to meet my colleagues. Thank God they told me not to get out of the car, otherwise I would have run straight into their arms. So it was another stroke of luck for everyone involved, but the mood was very depressed."

For the makers of the Swiss film "Der Kreis", it is therefore clear that Wednesday's arson attack on the Kindo Zhovten was also a "hate-motivated action". In the middle of the screening of the film "Les nuits d'été" - which is about travesty - an unknown person threw an incendiary device into the auditorium on Wednesday, as the producer of "Der Kreis", Ivan Madeo, announced on Friday.

Michael Stütz was present at the attack: "I was sitting in the hall when the whole thing started, smoke bombs suddenly went off and it began to burn," he told the "Kreis" team by email. Fortunately, the hall was not particularly full, otherwise there could have been mass panic with unforeseeable consequences. "We all got out relatively quickly and in an orderly fashion. But when suddenly a lot of smoke started pouring into the foyer, already from the fire, everyone panicked and wanted to get out, pushing doors in the wrong direction - the whole nine yards." Unfortunately, the cinema was completely overwhelmed and the police were nowhere to be seen even 30 minutes after the attack - when the entire rear roof was already ablaze.

The festival will continue and, according to Mayor Vitali Klitschko, the cinema will be rebuilt. The team from "Der Kreis" expressly points out that the actions were not explicitly directed against their film, but against the "Sunny Bunny" section in general. "The Circle" is set in the Zurich gay scene of the 1950s and 1960s and was selected by the Federal Office of Culture in September as the Swiss entry in the race for an Oscar in 2015 (Werbewoche.ch reported). The film was launched at the 2014 Berlinale in the Panorama section, where it won the Teddy Award and the Audience Award (Werbewoche.ch reported). (hae)