

A Hollywood film about a Soviet serial killer has been pulled from cinema schedules in Russia just days before it was due for release. Child 44, which stars Tom Hardy and Gary Oldman and is produced by Ridley Scott, was deemed “historically inaccurate” by Russia’s culture ministry.

While the ministry claimed the distributor decided not to release the film, industry experts said such a move would be unprecedented, and suggested it was another case of the ministry intervening to block culture it has deemed “ideologically incorrect”. The director of a Siberian opera house was fired recently after a staging of a Wagner opera featured controversial images of Jesus Christ.

The plot of Child 44 revolves around the search for a serial killer set in the early 1950s, and is based on the novel of the same name by the British author Tom Rob Smith. The author has said his book is loosely based on the story of the real-life mass murderer Andrei Chikatilo, although the action is set decades before Chikatilo’s killings took place. It was due for release across Russia at the end of this week, but mysteriously disappeared from schedules on Wednesday morning.

Later, a joint statement from the distributor, Central Partnership, and the culture ministry said the company had withdrawn its request to show the movie in Russia, “accepting all commercial consequences of this decision”.

“The Russian ministry of culture received questions about the contents of the film, particularly the distortion of historical facts and the interpretation of events before, during and after the Great Patriotic War [the second world war], as well as the character and spirit of Soviet citizens of this historical period,” the statement read.

On Tuesday, there was a screening of the film for Russian officials and unspecified “experts”, after which the decision was taken not to show Child 44 in Russia. “After this viewing, the opinion of the distributors and the ministry representatives coincided: it is unacceptable to show this kind of film on the eve of the 70th anniversary of victory.”

Russia is preparing lavish celebrations for the anniversary on 9 May, with the leaders of India and China, as well as North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, expected to join the president, Vladimir Putin, for a military parade on Red Square.

The statement did not give any examples of what the ministry felt to be historical distortions. A trailer for the film shows little that appears controversial except for the dubious approximations of Russian accents used by the cast . However, one Russian reviewer of the film called it “hellish anti-Soviet trash” and claimed it was full of historical inaccuracies, such as references to Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s book The Gulag Archipelago, which was published two decades after the film is set.

Pavel Stepanov, head of the film’s Russian distributor, told RIA Novosti news agency that he was “unsatisfied” with the film, and called for “more government control over the distribution of films which have a socially important context to them”.

Johnny O’Reilly, an Irish director who is set to release Moscow Never Sleeps, a feature film set and shot in the Russian capital, later this year, said the majority of censorship in the Russian cinema world was self-censorship, with producers and distributors aware they would get big budgets for “war movies glorifying heroic deeds” and knowing to avoid criticism of the Russian Orthodox church or Putin. Regulations suggest that government funding goes to “patriotic films”, but open application of censorship is more haphazard, O’Reilly said.

“On the one hand, the ministry of culture seems to be in the grip of an irrational fear of anything that veers from rose-tinted, government-endorsed narratives about Russia. On the other hand, there are plenty of movies being made inside Russia that challenge those narratives,” he said.

The most notable of these was Andrei Zvyagintsev’s recent film Leviathan, which features venal Russian bureaucrats in cahoots with a corrupt, bloated church, and was nominated for an Oscar. It did well at the box office in Russia but has been repeatedly criticised by the authorities. The film also had to be amended for its Russian release after a recent law banned swearing in films and television shows.

More controversy:

Leviathan

Russia’s culture minister said he did not like Zvyagintsev’s film, which was praised by critics around the world, and said that in future similar films would not receive government funding. This week, Father Tikhon Shevkunov, an Orthodox priest considered to be Putin’s personal confessor, said he disliked the film and declared that it was “absolutely not art” as it was too gloomy.

Tannhauser

After a production at Novosibirsk’s opera theatre featured imagery that a small number of religious believers considered blasphemous, the opera’s director, as well as the director of the opera house, were put on trial. They were acquitted, but the opera house’s director was fired last month anyway, and the production removed from the schedule.

Second world war exhibition

Russia has been flooded with exhibits and television programmes documenting the bravery and losses of the Red Army ahead of the 70th anniversary in May, but anything that does not fit the official narrative is considered suspect. An exhibition in Yekaterinburg featuring pictures from British and American photographers to celebrate the allied war effort was cancelled this week, reportedly after pressure from the authorities.