State Duma deputy Maria Butina was once an inmate in an American prison. She wrote a book about it, and a TV series was made based on it. The actors and prototypes of the film’s characters met at the premiere. Maria Butina admitted that she has not forgotten those events. American Patrick Byrne said that he also wrote a book about this spy scandal and there is also an American TV series based on it. Both films “are the key and the lock of what happened.” FBI agents take a happy girl from her fiancé’s house in New York and plunge her into an atmosphere of fear and torture of imprisonment. By chance, she learns that she has become the heroine of an international spy scandal at the highest level. This is not just the story of Maria Zhukova from the Prison Diary series, but also the harsh reality that young Maria Butina once had to face. Then she will become a deputy of the State Duma, realize her plans and ideas, and write a book of the same name about her misadventures in the United States. And now we see a defenseless girl on the screen who finds the strength to resist the FBI machine of breaking the human psyche.
“Maria Zhukova is not exactly Maria Butina. This is a movie that has prototypes, but is built according to its own genre laws,” says the leading actress, Maria Lopatina. “In this role, it was a great joy for me to create the image of a strong woman.”
The prototype of Patrick Shel in the series was the American Patrick Byrne. Although in “Prison Diary” he is the main villain, introducing him, Maria Butina said that she “does not undertake to judge this man, and in order to understand his role in the events, you need to watch the series to the end.” Patrick Byrne himself said that he also wrote a book about what happened, and it was also filmed in the USA, and both of these films “can become the key and lock of this story.” He admitted that he used Maria to fight the deep state in the USA: “She became bait on the hook for the enemies of President Trump.”
Someone in the audience noted that Byrne was lucky because the role of Patrick Shel was played by Alexander Derevyanko, a much more impressive man than his prototype. The film crew said that they were worried about political events in the world, because they could affect the rental fate of the series. But, fortunately, everything is going exactly as predicted in the film.
You begin to empathize with the heroine from the first minute of the film and, it seems, you feel her pain and despair. I am already stocking up on popcorn and handkerchiefs. Maria Butina said that “sometimes it seems to me that I am still in solitary confinement, and what is happening around me now, I myself invented while in prison.”