Flight To Freedom, a film by Current Time Digital video producer Mykola Nemchenko and RFE/RL multimedia coordinator Kateryna Oliynyk, shares the story of Czechoslovak cycling champion Robert Hutyra, who, in 1983, used a hot air balloon he had built to fly his family out from behind the Iron Curtain and into neighboring Austria.
Current Time TV's Form #087 mini-series on the lives of transgender Russians has been nominated for Best Representation on Screen at the 2019 Content Innovation Awards on October 13. In this interview, series creator Yekaterina Ponomaryova, a Russian documentary filmmaker, explains how she came up with the idea for the series and why, despite pervasive negative stereotypes, tolerance toward transgenders runs strongest in Russia's provinces.
In Soviet times, Aleksandra Selyaninova worked for 16 years within the Ministry of Internal Affairs’ regional offices. When she retired in 1989, she made another change as well: She changed her sex, becoming a woman. "I took off my uniform and put on a dress," she says with a laugh. (Filmmaker: Yekaterina Ponomaryova)
Forty years of Soviet nuclear bomb tests have left a toxic wasteland in Kazakhstan. The nuclear explosions have stopped, but Russia still rents vast swathes of Kazakh territory for missile tests that critics say are devastating for the environment and its inhabitants. Filmmaker: Harutyun Mansuryan. Wasteland first aired on Current Time TV's Crossroads program in March 2019.
A survivor of the 1988 chemical gas attack on the Iraqi Kurdish city of Halabja makes a remarkable journey back home to discover his lost family, his people, and himself. Originally broadcast by Current Time's Crossroads program. (Director: Stuart Greer, RFE/RL)
In a remote desert near the border between Kazakhstan and China, a massive dry port has been built to develop overland routes for Chinese exports to markets in Europe, Russia, and Central Asia.
During Soviet times, officials moved many blind and visually-impaired citizens into the village of Rusinovo, some 386 kilometers northeast of Moscow. The idea was to improve their quality of life, but Current Time TV's Vadim Kondakov found that life in Rusinovo today is less than ideal.
