Havana Marking Wins Sundance Institute TED Award for Ukranian Corruption Doc ‘Bloody Money,’ to Premiere via Vice

The second Sundance Institute | TED Prize Filmmaker Award, including a $125,000 grant, has been awarded to Havana Marking (HBO’s “Silencing the Song: An Afghan Fallen Star,’ pictured above) for her short documentary “Bloody Money,” about corruption in the Ukrainian government and featuring the work of TED Prize winner Charmian Gooch of Global Witness, a watchdog group that advocates for full transparency in the logging, mining, oil, and gas sectors worldwide.
 
“Bloody Money,” currently in production, reaches from Kiev to London to Washington, D.C., exposing the ways in which global financial systems actively enable and encourage corruption. The film, following Global Witness, examines how anonymous shell companies and Western banks are used to enable corrupt governments to rob their nation’s wealth and natural resources. Gooch received the $1 million TED Prize in 2014, and Marking’s intention is to illuminate the extent and malign effects of anonymous companies.
 
VICE News, which has reported extensively on the crisis in Ukraine, has signed on as an executive producer of “Bloody Money,” and will premiere the film exclusively on their platform. VICE News’ ongoing “Russian Roulette” series has produced over 100 video dispatches from the region to date, with over 50 million video views, garnering numerous journalism awards for their coverage.