An American documentary film crew says it was attacked by a crowd in Ukraine on Saturday and barely escaped alive, Mashable has learned.
The crew, which consisted of five Americans — including the team behind the 2013 award-winning documentary Blood Brother — and three Ukrainian assistants, had traveled to Mariupol in southeastern Ukraine to finish shooting its new Kickstarter-backed documentary Gennadiy, about a local children’s orphanage.
See also: 9 Essential Questions About Ukraine, Answered
The following chain of events were conveyed to Mashable by the Steve Hoover, the film's director, and Danny Yourd, its producer. The crew's translator, Fillip Velgach, also provided Mashable with a writeup of the incident.
It began when the crew members were traveling back to their hotel just outside the city of Mariupol, and they decided to stop to film a small pro-Russian rally, the filmmakers say. It was just a few blocks away and seemed relatively calm. A crowd had gathered near a downtown plaza for hours, waving Russian flags and Soviet banners, and somebody was yelling into a megaphone professing the town's support for Russian President Vladimir Putin. It was a beautiful day. It looked "totally chill." There were dogs lying around in the sun.

Image: Animal Media Group
After five or 10 minutes of gathering shots, a rumor began to spread through the crowd that the group included American journalists. They were accosted by two men who criticized America’s role in the escalating conflict between Russia and Ukraine, who called them “scum” and “traitors."
“Maybe we should rough up you Americans," the men said, smiling, according to Filipp Velgach, the group's translator. The filmmakers, lost in translation, didn't get the joke.
They decided it was a good time leave.

Image: Animal Media Group
"At first I couldn’t tell how serious it was," Steve Hoover, the director of the film, told Mashable. "It was hard for me to believe that it would escalate further. I thought we’d get into the van after they had scared us off, and that’s that."
But a crowd gave chase. The film crew captured what came next.

"We ended up running across the plaza and into the van, and I think everyone in their own way was kinda thinking..." he trailed off. "It felt hopeless."
As they neared the van, which belonged to the orphanage and had the words “Russia without Orphans" and "Children!" taped on its side — a smaller crowd closed in. One of them shouted, “They’re Americans! Americans!” The crew scurried inside.
A Ukrainian man working with the filmmakers pushed them into the van, shut its doors, and was swallowed by the crowd.
But soon there were more.
They were swarming, chanting “Russia! Russia!," and as the driver attempted to make his escape, somebody tried to pull two of the crew members out of the van. It crashed into a truck.
"You look around and there were people everywhere," Hoover said. "It took a minute for our driver to get back in the car. We didn’t have the keys. It would have been impossible to run."
The crowd started breaking the windows. A crew member was pulled out into the street. Someone threw in a chemical that the filmmakers suspect to be tear gas or pepper spray.

Image: John Pope
"When that happened it was even more hopeless," Hoover said. "It was definitely a moment of — just kind of thinking is this it? The windows kept smashing. It was serious aggression, especially because we tried to get away people, just got more and more pissed. There was a lot of fear."
The driver hit the gas and they escaped, plowing through a crowd of people.
But they weren't done. A few men chased them on foot, throwing stones as the van drove off. Somebody captured the incident on camera and posted it to YouTube.

At this point, the crew had escaped the crowd, but two cars were hot on their tail — one was a red car, honking, and its driver was waving a gun out the driver's side window. As they wound through the streets, trying desperately to lose the cars, they heard gun shots. Their van slumped. The man was blowing out their tires.
As it slowed, he pulled up alongside the van and again fired the gun into the van. Glass shattered, spraying the occupants inside, and they raced for the local police station. Eventually the car turned down a side street and the crew was safe. Luckily for the filmmakers, the old Soviet-era gun contained only metal pellets. Still, the fear was real.
And everything was caught on tape. They had left the two cameras running throughout the chase.

Image: Animal Media Group
"The worst feeling was when we did finally get away from the crowd, we realized that we were being followed," Hoover, the film's director, said. "There were two cars. At that moment it was pretty terrifying, and the van was running on a flat. If it stops, or if the van malfunctioned, there were two cars full of Neo-Nazis ready to do whatever they wanted. It wasn’t until we saw the police and the police station until things started to come around."
The police then escorted them to the airport in Donetsk, an industrial city in eastern Ukraine, where they spent 15 hours at the airport's police barracks before leaving the country.
Now, back in the United States, Hoover said he holds no grudges.
"Honestly, we were warned. We shouldn’t have gone to the rally. It specifically says in the public warning stay away from rallies," he said. "It was our fault no matter how safe we were."
Hoover has since watched some of the YouTube videos posted by those aligned with the pro-Russia crowd. He said they had titles like, "We drove out fascist Ukrainians" — or something like that.
"I can’t begin to really understand whats boiling in their blood," Hoover, now in Pittsburgh and working on his film, said. "I’m not living the life. I was just visiting."
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