The lights went out suddenly on Monday at a movie theater in Saratov, just as a sell-out crowd was sitting down for a special presentation of “The Man Who Was Too Free,” a documentary film* about murdered opposition leader Boris Nemtsov.

According to a report by Svobodnye Novosti, the electrical outage knocked out the power in every building on Oktyabrskaya street in Saratov, affecting the cinema, a police station, a church, and several apartment buildings. The electricity cut out just as the coming attractions were wrapping up.

According to an employee at the movie theater, the city’s power company is blaming the outage on “an internal malfunction.”

Hours before the Nemtsov film was supposed to start, a man identifying himself as an official at the local branch of Russia’s Culture Ministry reportedly phoned the cinema to find out details about the theater’s showtimes.