User talk:69.181.23.220/Active Measures (2018 film)

Active Measures is a 2018 documentary film by director Jack Bryan.

Background
Active Measures is a 2018 documentary film by director Jack Bryan. It suggests that Vladmir Putin is behind a 30-year history of covert political warfare.

Soviet and Russian security services (Cheka, OGPU, NKVD, KGB, FSB) use the term active measures (активные мероприятия) for the actions of political warfare to influence the course of world events, in addition to collecting intelligence and producing "politically correct" assessment of it.

Jack Bryan was born in 1985, to Katherine Bryan and Shelby Bryan, in New York City, he spent his early childhood at an Upper East Side, Park Avenue townhouse, but the majority of his childhood moving around the United States and Europe. Jack has a brother, Austin, and two step-sisters, Ashley and Alexis, from Shelby's first marriage to Lucia Bryan. Bryan attended Eugene Lang College within The New School University as an undergraduate. Bryan was hired as a columnist for Quest Magazine, and became an Editor at Large. Bryan directed the documentary Life After Dark: The Story of Siberia Bar, released in 2009. Jack and Shelby Bryan lived in the same social circles of real-estate, Palm Beach, and the Upper East Side as Donald Trump.

On 06 August 2018, on CNN, Bryan says that Trump, in 1984, sold five Trump Tower condos to a Russian mobster named David Bogatin. BBC Newsnight reported on Donald Trump's business links to the mob in March 2016.

On 02 August 2018, on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Bryan claimed that Trump resorted to Russian money, after bankruptcies at Trump properties in the 1990s, that made it hard to get loans from American banks, but Trump only around 2002 began involvement with members of the Russian mob.

After the bankruptcies, Bayrock Group, a real estate firm with Russian backing moved into Trump Tower, its manager was Felix Sater, a convicted felon, and childhood friends with Trump's former attorney, Michael Cohen. "They went on their first date together," Bryan says. "They did a lot of business together."

Distribution
Active Measures premiered in April 2018 at the Hot Docs festival, in Toronto, and will be released by Super LTD, a film distribution company on August 31, 2018.

Critical reception
Frank Scheck of The Hollywood Reporter says "Well researched and truly frightening."..."One of the doc's strengths is the amazing number of "gets" (onscreen interview subjects) procured by the filmmakers."

Todd Gilchrist of TheWrap says "Most damning, though, is the sophisticated way that Bryan and Clements lay flat the history of technological attacks launched against oppositional regimes, and how brutally impactful they were because of attackers’ profound understanding of the psychologies of the sociocultural ecosystems into which they were released."

Charles Bramesco of The Guardian says "this exhaustive documentary struggles to move past outrage"..."Bryan synthesizes dozens upon dozens of articles for a more circumspect view of Russia’s ongoing meddling in American politics, running the risk of overloading his viewers instead of, er, under-loading them."

Bruce DeMara of the Toronto Star says "For anyone trying to navigate the labyrinth of personalities and events behind the ongoing investigation into Russian interference in the last U.S. presidential election, this film is a comprehensive and indispensable primer."

Non-trade reviews, since the Hot Docs festival, in Toronto, in April 2018, have not yet been widely published.

Financials
Wide release has not yet occurred.