A photo of a sad-looking Johnny Depp, the famed U.S actor and director, posing with a police mugshot board with “11.05.2014, Yakutsk, Russia, 20 years” written on it quickly went viral in Ukraine after being published on voiceproject.org on Nov. 16.
Depp was photographed as a prisoner to support the Crimean-born Ukrainian movie director Oleh Sentsov as part of the “Imprisoned for Art” photo campaign, initiated by the Voice Project international human rights organization.
The organization defends freedom of expression and supports artists involved in activism worldwide.
Sentsov was illegally imprisoned, subjected to a sham trial, and then sentenced to 20 years in Russian jail. He was detained in Crimea in May 2014 together with another Ukrainian activist, Oleksandr Kolchenko, and taken to Russia.
In August 2015 the North Caucasus District Court of Russia found Sentsov and Kolchenko guilty of setting up a terrorist group in Russian-occupied Crimea, committing two terrorist attacks, and planning another one with the use of explosive devices.
Sentsov was given 20 years in prison and Kolchenko 10 years. In May both prisoners applied for extradition to Ukraine, but Russian government refused to extradite them to Ukraine as they, as Crimeans, had automatically been given Russian citizenship.
The “Imprisoned for Art” campaign features Peter Gabriel, Johnny Depp, Russian punk band Pussy Riot’s leader Nadya Tolokonnikova, and others artists who support those of their colleagues imprisoned around the world exercising freedom of expression.
“It was very pleasant to find out that Depp supported Oleh in this campaign. My brother respects Depp’s works,” Natalia Kaplan, Sentsov’s sister, told the Kyiv Post.
Kaplan said that Sentsov, who is now kept in a jail in Yakutsk in Siberia, hasn’t complained of health problems and is striving to keep himself fit.
For the “Imprisoned for Art” campaign, each artist was paired with a currently imprisoned colleague and pictured holding a traditional police mugshot board with the arrest information.
The organizers printed the photos on T-shirts, which will be sold and the funds used for advocacy efforts.
“The campaign’s goal is to step up efforts to free dissidents currently imprisoned for simply using their art and voices to speak out,” reads the message on voiceproject.org.
“The types of people we’re defending are ones who have spoken out in spite of the consequences, and that takes courage, so I wanted to make a connection to powerful imagery,” said Anna-Marie Gabriel, the creative director and photographer of the campaign, and the daughter of Peter Gabriel.
Sentsov has made two featured films “Gamer” (2011) and “Rhinoceros” (2013). His two books – a novel “Buy this book – it’s funny” and collection of stories were published in 2014-2015, when the director was already imprisoned in Russia.
“If you didn’t know about the author, you might think you were reading good American prose, written in the 1970s. But “Buy this book – it’s funny” was written by a good Ukrainian writer, imprisoned in a Russian jail,” said Ukrainian writer Andriy Kurkov during the presentation of Sentsov’s book in 2014.
