Film review: Vera Krichevskaya’s ‘Connected’ Anton Dolin on the ‘unmistakable hope’ of a new documentary on businessman, scientist, and philanthropist Dmitry Zimin

The 2025 Artdocfest documentary film festival concludes in Riga this weekend. The pictures in the main competition program include Vera Krichevskaya’s “Connected,” which tells the story of entrepreneur Dmitry Zimin, the founder of VimpelCom (which operated the Beeline brand) and the Dynasty Foundation (which supported science and education efforts until its “foreign agent” designation in 2015). Krichevskaya filmed “Connected” shortly before Zimin’s death in December 2021, “capturing the closing scenes of a life and a time of peace.” Anton Dolin reviews this last look at one of Russia’s great philanthropists.

Krichevskaya’s film, which describes the life of businessman, scientist, and philanthropist Dmitry Zimin, uses familiar techniques to achieve something that’s neither a biopic nor a “ceremonial portrait.” There’s the typical series of interviews with the main character and his associates, the archival footage, old photographs, and narration with biographical details, but the film’s unconventional nature (whether planned from the start or crafted in the editing process) is evident even in the title, which doesn’t name Zimin. In Russian, it’s called Blizkie (which means “Close Ones”), while in English (the film is officially a U.K. production), it’s titled Connected.

“Close ones” in this case refers to business partners and friends, namely Zimin, who transformed during Perestroika from an engineer and researcher into an extraordinarily successful entrepreneur, and his American partner at VimpelCom, Augie Fabela. Their partnership symbolized the Iron Curtain’s collapse and the beginning of a new era in U.S.-Russia relations — an era that, unfortunately, ended much sooner than the film’s protagonists had hoped.

Fabela remained a close friend even after Zimin left the business world and devoted himself entirely to philanthropy, supporting science and the arts. In Krichevskaya’s film, Augie becomes the narrator — a simple but clever choice that broadens the story’s potential audience, offering an outsider perspective on Zimin’s remarkable career for those who don’t know him. Fabela, a man from a different world and yet still “close,” was among those with whom Mr. Zimin (“Dim’” to his friends) shared the final weeks of his life.

Connected also explores others in Zimin’s life, focusing first and foremost on his family — his wife, Maya, and his son Boris, who continues his legacy. There’s also the filmmaking team, which was granted access to document Zimin’s last days. Alongside Krichevskaya are cinematographer Heiko Gilberto and sound designer Daniel Goldan, who also served as the second cameraman. The scene unfolds on a yacht, where Zimin gathered friends for a farewell voyage. We know from the start of the film that he is preparing for an assisted death.

You might even say the title includes all of us — everyone for whom the film is meant. We are “connected” through the thoughts, words, and ideals of a man who modeled his business strategy on bringing people together. This message is especially vital in today’s dreary times of atomization and division.

The details of Zimin’s biography come into focus only by the film’s end. The 88-year-old complains about his memory, which seems to cause him more pain than the cancer eating him away. As if mimicking the selective nature of memory itself, Krichevskaya first focuses on Fabela, the energetic and accomplished son of American emigrants, and their shared journey through Russia’s new business landscape before exploring Zimin’s past.

We learn about his ancestors, from the Pale of Settlement to his father, who was branded an “enemy of the people.” We get his childhood and education, his academic interests, and his transformation into a researcher. There’s Zimin’s gutsy move to “reset” his life, and then his gradual disillusionment with the hopes of the 1990s and disappointment in the 21st century. On screen, we see Gorbachev and Reagan, Yeltsin and Clinton, Nemtsov, and then Putin-Putin-Putin. “He seems like a decent guy, but isn’t he a Chekist?” Zimin muses in one archival recording.

Told alternately by Augie and Dim’ himself, the story of how the “American dream meets Russian fate” unfolds in under two hours into a family chronicle — a snapshot or cast of the entire 20th century. Albeit in broad strokes, the film finds time for the century’s most defining events: revolution and war, repressions, the Thaw, tanks in Prague, dissidents, and Perestroika. It’s an unexpectedly inspiring spectacle about the significance of a single life amid the devastating purges of Grand History. Zimin’s strategy was not mere survival but defending his dignity with every step and every word.

The main twist is revealed in the opening credits: This is not a film about life but about death. Zimin’s magnificent voyage, surrounded by friends and like-minded people, is a final farewell before heading to a Swiss clinic to end his life on his own terms. “Live long? How much longer? For what? Why?” Zimin asks with a good-natured bewilderment. He requests to be buried in ski boots, with an epitaph that reads: “The person you are calling is currently outside the coverage area.”

A self-described native of Moscow’s storied Arbat alleys who liked to quote the poet Sergey Yesenin, Zimin could not bear the humiliation of seeing his Dynasty Foundation declared a “foreign agent.” In the film, he predicts a major war, which ultimately unfolds in Ukraine two months after his death. The overused cliché “the end of an era” becomes literal with Zimin — an entirely accurate description of his passing.

The film opens with an epigraph — a passage from a letter written by Alexey Navalny from prison, where he calls Dmitry Zimin a role model. Both these men are gone today, yet seeing their names together on screen evokes an illogical, irrational, yet unmistakable sense of hope.