MARK FRANCHETTI produced The Condemned, an independent feature-length documentary about a remote Russian prison that houses only murderers. He produced and co-directed Bolshoi Babylon, a feature-length documentary about the Bolshoi Theatre for HBO and the BBC. He also co-produced and co-directed Our Godfather, a Netflix feature-length documentary about Tommaso Buscetta, the first high-ranking Cosa Nostra boss to give evidence against the Mafia. He has presented and produced several BBC documentaries.

Franchetti worked for 25 years as a foreign correspondent for the Sunday Times of London, and for two decades served as its award-winning Moscow bureau chief. He has written extensively about Russia and the former Soviet Union and covered the conflict in Chechnya and the wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Georgia, and Ukraine.

ANDREW MEIER is an award-winning nonfiction author and former Moscow correspondent for Time magazine.  His most recent work is the critically acclaimed Morgenthau: Power, Privilege, and the Rise of an American Dynasty, an epic biography of four generations of the Morgenthau family across a century of New York and U.S. history.  His nonfiction history of Russia, Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After the Fall, has been widely hailed as one of the best books on the country to appear since the end of the USSR. Meier has contributed to The New York Times Magazine, among other national and international publications, for more than three decades. Meier co-produced and co-directed the Netflix documentary, Our Godfather (2019).

 

Franchetti and Meier, spent a combined total of 35 years reporting from Russia. Franchetti knew Estemirova personally. He met her on several occasions in Chechnya during some thirty reporting trips to cover the war. She played an instrumental role as a source of sensitive information and essential contacts in the region. 

Meier wrote the definitive account of the Novy Aldy massacre, one of the single worst war crimes against civilians in the Chechnya wars, when Russian forces shot dead more than sixty unarmed civilians, including elderly, women, and children.  Meier first learnt of the massacre as a result of Estemirova’s expose.

Estemirova doggedly investigated the massacre and played a critical role in helping relatives of the victims and survivors to bring a ground-breaking case against the Russian government to the European Court of Human Rights.