A video circulating online shows the filming of the short feature film ‘Hope’. The behind-the-scenes videos were taken from the TikTok account of the director Artem Kocharyan, who currently lives in Latvia. The film is based on the real story of his Ukraine acquaintance – a pregnant girl who lost her family due to the Russian aggression.
Propaganda Telegram channels and social media users are sharing footage of people in Ukrainian military uniforms storming a building and being filmed. Some users sharing this video claim that it is an ‘another staged video of the Kyiv regime’, which Ukraine allegedly shoots to “maintain fighting spirit in the Ukrainian Armed Forces’.
The anti-Ukrainian anonymous Telegram channel UKR_G_M, which regularly spreads disinformation about Ukraine, was the first to publish the video with such a caption.
The video circulating online shows the behind-the-scenes work of the cameraman, sound engineer and pyrotechnician, and the video itself is probably a backstage scene from the filming of a movie about Russia’s war against Ukraine. A search for the original video on Google Images, as well as the InVid tool, yielded no positive results. However, StopFake journalists managed to find a fragment of this video using the #backstage hashtag on TikTok. The video’s author is a user @artemkocharian1. Further analysis of his TikTok account revealed two more videos (filming the explosion and the cameraman’s work), which were also later used by propagandists.
The user @artemkocharian1 also published the story of the Latvian TV channel RUS.LSM.lv about the shooting of a short feature film ‘Hope’ about the Russian aggression against Ukraine. In it, Artem Kocharian, the movie’s director and the owner of the TikTok account @artemkocharian1, talks about the movie’s plot and the filming process. The main role in the movie is played by Ukrainian actress Maryna Bilous, who currently lives in Latvia. On her social media page she posts a lot about the shooting process.
Moreover, this is not the first RUS.LSM.lv story about this film. On January 31, the TV channel already reported that the author of the idea for the short feature film ‘Hope’ is their colleague, RUS.LSM.lv operator Artem Kocharyan.
In an interview with the Ukrainian TV channel Ukrinform TV, Kacharyan says that the film is based on the real story of a Ukrainian girl he knows. After February 24, she, pregnant at that time, lost her whole family. With her permission and without disclosing her name, Kocharyan recorded this story and decided to make a feature film ‘Hope’. The director himself knows firsthand what war is, because he served in the Ukrainian military for almost four years. After being wounded, he was released due to health reasons. When full-scale Russian aggression began, he moved to Latvia with his pregnant wife.
Previously, StopFake refuted similar disinformation in the story Fake: Russian military’s Atrocities in Hostomel Are Staged.
