Citizen K (Alex Gibney, 2019) USA, UK

Reviewed by Luther Richert. Viewed at the 2019 AFI festival.

Today’s headlines are filled with the words “billionaire” and “oligarch.” If you’re conspiracy minded, like me, it’s not hard to believe the entire world is run by a handful of corrupt, mostly unknown, filthy rich puppet masters who’s short-term self-interests control almost everything. After screening the documentary Citizen K (2019) at the American Film Institute Film Festival (aka #AFIFest) not only are my paranoid beliefs even stronger, I have now seen a glimpse of the road map of how we got here.

Narrated by the films award winning director, Alex Gibney, who also directed Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (nominated for Academy Award in 2005) and the Academy Award winning Taxi To The Dark Side (2007), Citizen K is much more than an academic exercise in information gathering and sharing. It plays more like a tense political thriller explaining in detail how Khodorkovksy and Putin himself navigated the fall of the Soviet Union to first enrich themselves but ultimately secure seemingly unlimited power and control over all of Russia’s major institutions.

The exquisitely photographed aerial shots in the opening sequence perfectly set the stage by turning Russia’s vast industrial oil fields into a vision of beauty and opportunity. You can also check out oilfield completion services as they are known for that purpose. A vision recognized and manifested by Mikhairl Khodorkovsky, henceforth known as “Citizen K”. This is a cinematic and suspenseful portrait of a billionaire oligarch’s rise and fall. It includes extensive use of sometimes hilarious, sometimes scary, and sometimes mind blowing archival news footage going back over 40 years. At the height of Khodorkovsky’s power he openly admits in an archival news clip to buying politicians “just like they do in America.” This treasure trove of history is supported by more than 20 hours of contemporary face-to-face interviews conducted personally by Gibney with the highly charismatic Khodorkovsky, his friends and enemies. Interviews include Russian journalists, businesspeople (including other exiled oligarchs who crossed Putin) and his legal team that couldn’t keep him out of a Siberian prison for over 10 years but did help keep him alive and ultimately set free.

One of the great scenes in the film is an archival media clip of a student asking Putin during an obviously choreographed town hall about an experience that changed his life. With his eyes welling up in tears he says “the collapse of the Soviet Union.” That powerful moment isn’t fully explored in this film but is covered thoroughly in the award winning coverage of Putin by PBS’s FRONTLINE, the only source of information on Putin that comes close to this epic film. Citizen K and any of FRONTLINE documentaries on Putin would be the perfect double feature for any of my fellow conspiracy theorists out there.

If you’re interested in digging deeper into today’s headlines, or simply a fan of political intrigue and suspense at the highest levels of society, Citizen K is the movie for you. It’s the story of a Russian billionaire oligarch that came to control the oil, media and politicians of an entire country. It also describes in great detail how Putin seized control of Khodorkovsky’s entire ill gotten empire and how Putin continues to ruthlessly wield it’s stolen and concentrated wealth and power to this day. From the safety of his offices in London, Citizen K predicts that Putin will fall “any-day now.” To his critics who have noticed that his prediction of Putin’s immanent demise began many years ago, he explains that his 10 years in prison has given him a different understanding and interpretation of “any day now” than the rest of us. For him it means 5 to 10 years…or so. I eagerly await the sequel, which I’m sure will creep even closer to our own doorstep.