5 Great Crowdfunds of Christian Orthodox Content from Russia - Award-winning Films, Content Creators, and Much More
New movies, books, articles, videos, cartoons, podcasts, memes, and more!
Christ is Risen!
About 2 months ago I had the idea of crowdfunding a translation into English of a remarkable set of books I had discovered here in Russia which debunks Darwinism better than anything else I’ve read, and I’ve read a lot on the subject. The response was very strong.
My original goal was $22,000 to translate just the first volume of the 3 volume set. The crowdfund ended on April 21, and it raised over $40,000, allowing me to fund substantially more of the project. You can find details on the Indiegogo page for the drive.
Shortly after I launched that drive, something ‘strange’ started to happen. Without me making any effort to find them, more extremely compelling, I would even say extraordinarily important, content literally landed in my lap, without me looking for it, or soliciting it in any way. I was so busy running the last crowdfund, doing my journalism, and preparing for Pascha (Easter) that I had little time for anything else. This content has potentially wider appeal even than the books which so powerfully refute evolution.
It struck me at the time that this must be more than a coincidence, and that God wants content from Russia to reach Western audiences. I discussed it with friends and colleagues, and when we started thinking about it, it occurred to us that Russia has even more excellent and compelling content that could be crowdfunded, which would appeal to Western Christians, Orthodox and non-Orthodox alike, and even general audiences.
Instead of launching these crowdfunds sequentially, which would delay getting the results to the public, which I believe is so urgent in these days of conflict, we decided that the best solution would be to launch simultaneous drives, and make as much of this content available to the public as quickly as possible. I don’t know if that will work, but it seems like the right thing to do.
In retrospect, it doesn’t surprise me at all that these projects have come our way, by Divine intervention, or otherwise. A couple of months ago I wrote two long articles here and here, where I explain in detail that Russia is an absolute treasury of fantastic Orthodox and Christian content - movies, books, articles, videos, cartoons, podcasts, memes, and more - content which will have wide appeal far beyond Orthodox Christian, or even just Christian audiences. I got involved in a volunteer project to caption a lot of these videos last year, and it has been unusually successful. They have put up some fantastic videos over the months, captioning over 100 videos, consisting of more than 16 hours of video. Over 50 people from around the world have volunteered.
So we’ve decided to go ahead and launch a number of these drives in the near future, to run concurrently, and there are more projects in the pipeline.
Now I want to tell you about the first two which completely accidentally landed in my lap, by odd ‘coincidence’ when I was far too busy to even think about undertaking anything else, and I think you may agree with me that this goes well beyond ‘coincidences’, which by the way, do not exist.
Prize Winning Documentary film about the Solovetsky Monastery
The first is an absolutely extraordinary film recently released in Russia about one of its most storied and famous monasteries, which played a tragic role during the USSR, on an island near the White Sea, near the arctic circle. I believe it is the most spiritually strong of the major monasteries today, and have good reason for thinking so which I hope to explain in a later article.
The film, with a budget of $200,000, easily won first prize in the documentary category at the 2022 Moscow International Film Festival. This is a very big deal because the MIFF is arguably the 2nd most important festival in the world after the Academy Awards, and actually presents better films than the Academy Awards given the sorry woke state of the West. Prior to 2022 and the current political problems, a film winning such a prize would automatically be on the short list of nominations at the Academy Awards.
But this doesn’t really illustrate the achievement of this film or its director, Sergei Debizhev. The fact is that Debizhev, a devout Orthodox Christian, has revolutionized the documentary film genre with his films over the last few years here in Russia and worldwide, and he is really in a class by himself. He is as much of a superstar in the film world as Ken Burns, but much, much more interesting and technically innovative. Here is an excellent review of the film which I published on this blog earlier this week.
Because Debizhev is a deeply thoughtful Christian, actually a convinced monarchist, he was able to steer the monks to discuss profound topics, which makes for great Christian content. The film is so technically superb and visually stunning that you almost don’t expect it to be very ‘deep’, so when he starts dropping pearls of Christian wisdom, it is almost disorienting. Here is a 15 minute film about the film, (in Russian), with plenty of clips to get an idea of it, with him receiving the award at the 14.08 mark. Mr. Debizhev gave us a 2 hour interview. The editing and transcription / voiceover will be part of the crowdfund.
There is so much more to say about Debizhev, this film, his previous films, and the one he is working on now, again on a Christian topic, but that is beyond the scope of this article. I just wanted to give you a brief foretaste of this important film.
Documentary film about the Russian Revolution from Bishop Tikhon, Author of Everyday Saints
This is another excellent, long (4.5 hours) documentary which came out in the Spring of 2021, which has huge significance for America and the West today. Bishop Tikhon is very well known among Orthodox Christians because his book, Everyday Saints, was a best-seller in the West, but for those of you who don’t know, he is one of the most influential and important senior clerics in Russia today, and by far the most famous, both inside and outside Russia.
The basic argument of the film is that just about EVERYTHING we have been taught about the Russian revolution, both in Russia and the West, is not true, and the true cause of the revolution was that the Russian elite, including the church, the military, and the aristocracy, colluded in a coup, in close cooperation with British intelligence services, to depose the Tsar. In other words, it was not a popular revolution of unhappy workers and peasants. It was not because Russia was losing WWI. The film proves that Russia was actually winning that war. In a nutshell, the film comprehensively demolishes the narrative we have been sold about what was going on in Russia at the time, with exhaustive facts, figures, data, and arguments, and the implications of this revisionist understanding for today are enormous.
A full explanation of the arguments and conclusions presented in the film is too much to get into here, and can be the subject of a future article. The film is hugely important to what is going on in the West today because it explains, very convincingly, that in essence, Russia’s elite became hopelessly ‘woke’ mostly because, you guessed it, a lying media completely buffaloed them, and in their delusion, they wrecked their own highly successful country, egged on by a European deep state, and created the conditions for the horror and terror which then engulfed Russia for the next 30 years. Sound familiar?
Watching the film, it is clear that Tikhon is speaking to a Russian audience, warning them against repeating a similar mistake today. I doubt he understands that the film has even more relevance to the West than to modern Russia. I so much want to make this film available to English language audiences. The parallels between what he describes going on in Russia at the time and what is now transpiring in the West are jaw-dropping.
If anyone had told me 2 months ago that the rights owners of these two films would be willing to help us crowdfund them in the West, I would have thought they were smoking something. But there it is.
Other worthy projects in the pipeline are ‘Candlestick’ (the global volunteer group captioning Orthodox Christian videos from Russian into English), possibly an Orthodox news website (not my Russian Faith, something different), and more books and feature length films. We are still working out the details on all this, so watch this space for updates.
As I said, with this deluge of first-rate, highly topical content available, much of it urgently relevant to today’s events, it seems to us that we should just make as much of it available to English language audiences as soon as possible.
One thing I learned two months ago while running the crowdfund refuting Darwin, is that crowdfunding is much more work than I ever imagined, and there is no way I can do this on my own, so I have asked some friends with excellent contacts in Orthodox Christian circles in the US and Europe to help. We’ve put together a great team to run these crowdfunds, and I think they could really reach a lot of people, even more than we reached with the three volume set on Creation & Evolution.
We are planning to setup these new projects in the coming weeks, letting you know as soon as they become available.
God bless every one of you. Christ is Risen!
Dear Fr. Joseph, I'm very interested in moving to Russia. Would you be so kind as to tell us what healthcare is like in Russia? My brother is a type one diabetic and my mother has severe asthma. We want to live in Russia our only concern is if we will receive effective healthcare. I implore you to write about this. In June I will be subscing to your channel, for the year. I can afford a 75.00 subscription so we can email and hopefully Skype. I hate Wokeism so I think we will be good friends.
Do you have a link to the documentary film about the real story behind the Russian Revolution, by Bishop Tikhon? I can't find it anywhere. Thank you.