For a long time, Oliver Stone (77) had a reputation as a Hollywood director: harshly criticizing systems of power, especially those in the USA. He owed it to the Vietnam films “Platoon” (1986) and “Born on the Fourth of July” (1989) or “Wall Street” (1987), a replica of “Yuppie capitalism”.
Internal documents and the statements of an ex-employee are now said to prove that the three-time Oscar winner is said to have given his name to initiate planned portraits of autocrats such as Alexander Lukashenko (Belarus) and Ilham Aliyev (Azerbaijan). A portrait has already been realized. The documentary “Qazaq – History of the Golden Man” revolves around the former Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who was sole ruler for almost 30 years.
Content control instead of criticism
Here Nazarbayev is said to have intervened at the key levels that rob a film production of critical independence: budget and content. Nazarbayev was said to have been the “editor-in-chief,” as well as the financier and client. Stone, whose face is also used to advertise the film, was not able to act as a critical interviewer, but rather as a keyword for a commissioned work. The film was directed by Igor Lopatonok, who is also listed as co-writer of the script and is reportedly Stone’s partner.
The papers that are supposed to prove the described flows of money and information were available to ZDF Frontal, “Spiegel”, “Standard”, “Tagesanzeiger”, the Russian investigative medium “iStories”, the research association “OCCRP” and the Kazakh investigative portal “Vlast”. The media association made the story public. Most recently, Stone was noticed when he interviewed Vladimir Putin several times for the TV documentary “The Putin Interviews” (2017). This has already been discussed controversially, but the current allegations are a new league.
