Paul Devlin’s Power Trip is a tragicomic portrait of the pitfalls of capitalism in one republic of the former Soviet empire. JT Leroy talks with the director.

AES Manager Piers Lewis explains to angry protesters why there are frequent blackouts in Tbilisi, former Soviet Republic of Georgia.

The recent arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia’s richest man and head of its largest oil company, Yukos, is a troubling development that has mobilized the attention of the world press. While Khodorkovsky is no model citizen — a onetime functionary in the Communist Party youth organization, he emerged from a dubious privatization auction in 1995 with control over one of Russia's biggest oil companies — he has over the past three years nevertheless become an outspoken advocate for greater transparency in business, laying out Yukos’s financials for everyone to see while publicly challenging President Vladimir Putin by supporting parliamentary opposition parties.

The travails of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, however, are hardly an isolated incident in Russia: the business tycoon Vladimir Gusinsky — owner of Media Most, which controls the independent television channel NTV, a radio station, and several other media which have been critical of the Kremlin — has been accused of fraud and is not allowed to leave the country; Russian tax police have opened criminal cases against several other firms, including the country’s leading oil company, Lukoil, and its biggest car maker, AvtoVAZ. Prosecutors have also raised questions about the privatization of companies such as Norilsk Nikel, Russia's largest nickel producer; and the country's huge energy monopoly, UAS, has also come under fire.

The crackdown on Russia’s oligarchs may be a necessary correction to widespread fraud and embezzlement, or as many believe, it may signal a more troubling backlash against free enterprise and the rise of democracy in a country still largely ruled by former functionaries of the Soviet Politburo and the KGB.

Paul Devlin’s Power Trip , which documents the challenges faced by an American energy company, AES Corp., following its purchase of Telasi, the largest supplier of electricity in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, offers compelling support for the latter: the transition to democracy and the development of a viable market economy throughout the former Soviet Union is fraught with problems unimaginable in the West.

Devlin gained unprecedented access to AES-Telasi through a former university classmate, Piers Lewis, who was hired by AES as strategic project director in order to upgrade the Republic of Georgia’s power supply and to begin charging for the delivery of electricity to consumers. AES-Telasi spent over $90 million improving the power lines and metering customers in Tbilisi, but when the company sent out its bills — averaging $24 per month in a city where the average wage is as little as $15 per month — the vast majority of Georgians refused to pay. AES-Telasi, which at one point were losing an estimated $120,000 a day, simply cut off their power.

Public unrest grew; many of the power company’s meters were vandalized, and others were simply jerry-rigged in order to steal electricity. But AES-Telasi was steadfast: customers must learn to pay for the service.

Even paying customers, however, infrequently received electricity in Tbilisi, where blackouts became a daily occurrence. As AES discovered, the electricity supply was routinely diverted to government facilities, many of which had not paid their own electric bills, under orders from the Energy Minister.

Indeed, electricity is not the only power at stake in Power Trip : The film sets AES’s struggle within the context of Georgian politics, including the recent parliamentary elections, widely believed to have been corrupted by massive vote fraud. (On November 22, 2003, as President Eduard Shevardnadze prepared to swear in a new government, protesters stormed the Georgian parliament in a “bloodless revolution” that lead to Shevardnadze’s resignation. The opposition leader Nino Burdzhanadze promised to hold new elections within 45 days.)

As an article in The Washington Post (“Georgia Overwhelmed by its Own Failures,” November 15, 2003) points out: “A dozen years after independence, the former Soviet republic in the Caucusus Mountains has become the archetype of a failed state, overwhelmed by poverty, stagnation, graft and separatist divisions…. ‘It’s just a big dysfunctional web,’ said Dean White, a senior partner at PA Consulting Group, the U.S. firm [now] struggling to fix the electrical system.”

Power Trip sets the stage for the recent Georgian coup d’etat in illuminating detail. Novelist JT Leroy talks with director Paul Devlin.

JT Leroy: First of all, let’s say what the film is about.

Paul Devlin: “Power Trip is about corruption, assassination and street rioting over electricity in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. And it follows the story of an American corporation trying to solve the electricity crisis there, but instead getting crushed by the post-Soviet chaos.” I’ve got that pretty well memorized.

Leroy: It’s almost like a Catholic catechism.

Devlin: Can’t stumble on the pitch, especially with a story that’s so tricky to describe. Otherwise, you lose people right away. That was a problem even when I was filming. The people I interviewed for the movie sometimes asked, “Is anybody going to be interested in this? Electricity in Georgia?”

Leroy: Well, I really love this film, and I think it just epitomizes documentary filmmaking at its best.

Devlin: Thanks very much. I really believe in the non-fiction film genre. I think we have a bad rap because of the word “documentary” and I try not to use it. The LA Weekly called Power Trip “a real-life thriller.” Someone else called it a “dark comedy.” I like that one.

Leroy: It kind of is.

Devlin: Yeah, we get some humor out of the situation because of the absurd culture clashes and misunderstandings when the Americans try to impose overnight capitalism on a country of former Communists. And you can play on the word “dark” a little bit — not just because of the blackouts but because of the tough situation the Georgians are in.

So, as we go out in the market theatrically, we’re trying to find alternatives to the word “documentary,” change the language a bit and change people’s perceptions a bit as well, and emphasize that this movie is entertaining. You’ll learn a lot about a world you never knew before, but it will be fun to watch, there are funny parts and there’s also tragedy. And those are the elements that make up the best fiction films as well.

Leroy: When I was watching the film, at first AES-Telasi come across as the bad guys. After all, these poor Georgian people, they’ve had electricity free their whole lives, they don’t have much money, how are they expected to pay for it? But as the film went on, I found myself actually rooting for AES. You realize, what they’re actually doing is trying to raise the level of responsibility in a country devoid of accountability.

Devlin: That comes through in the film I think because that was part of my journey as well. I know Piers Lewis, the main character in the film who is also manager of AES, the massive American “global power company.” I saw Piers and AES doing these nasty things, such as disconnecting entire neighborhoods in Tbilisi because they weren’t paying their electric bills, for example. And I’d come back with the footage and show early rough cuts and everyone hated the Americans for what they were doing.

But as I learned more about the situation and the story developed, I started to realize that the company was genuinely trying to help the Georgians solve their electricity problem. They had very unusual values — “Integrity, Social Responsibility, Fairness and Fun” — and they really seemed to believe in them. So that gave me an opportunity to develop a sort of character arc of Piers and AES, where your perception of them changes over the course of the film. And also maybe deliver a more hopeful message about corporate America than we normally see.

Leroy: How did you hook up with Piers Lewis?

Devlin: I knew him from university. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. So, when we decided to do the movie, he gave me access. And he turned out to be a great contradictory character. He’s a progressive, Berkeley-educated, world-traveler, NGO type, but he winds up working for this huge multi-national, disconnecting the Georgians from their electricity. And the crazy thing is the Georgians love him because he’s been there seven or eight years, speaks the language, and really understands them.

It was actually Piers’s idea to make the movie; he inspired it. He invited me to visit him in Tbilisi [capital of the Republic of Georgia] and said, “This place is crazy! There are amazing stories here. You’ve got to do a movie about this place.” And I said, “You’re nuts! How am I going to try to tell the story of the epic post-Soviet transition to capitalism? It’s too big.” And he kept encouraging it and I sent a camera over there and Valery Odikadze, a Georgian cameraman who eventually became a co-producer, shot some great scenes of workers pulling down illegal power lines. And then I went over there just expecting to make a fund-raising demo, but there was so much amazing footage that I said, “Okay, I’m hooked, I’ll do it.” That’s when I was able to shoot the disconnections and the street rioting and that kind of stuff.

The challenge was, these esoteric topics and this complicated, global post-Soviet stuff that is sort of difficult to describe just in words, but when you get those kinds of visuals and you see that kind of conflict and the drama that happens when people get disconnected from their electricity, suddenly these localised events give you a hook to hang the larger issues.

So it becomes clear, for example, how American optimism can be profoundly naïve, because a system that works at home will not necessarily work in a foreign culture without first laying a groundwork of education and rule of law. And then we can understand the profound disappointment that independence has been to many post-Soviet states, to the point that some even want to go back to Communism. And then there’s gradual understanding that electricity is like air to modern civilization — civilization dies without it, and when you don’t have it, you’ll do anything to get it.

So I realized that the way to get to these big issues, was through all these smaller stories, like pulling down the rats nests of illegal lines and disconnecting poor old ladies when they don’t pay their bills. So, that’s when I decided to go for it, but it was really Piers’s encouragement that got me there.

Leroy: And I love the way the film shows that so much of the society is about hustling.

Devlin: Oh, man, it’s definitely true in Georgia. Straight up to the top of the government. They really hustled AES, who were pretty naïve, really. Everyone was stealing power from the Americans. Even the Energy Minister was willing to let whole neighborhoods in Tbilisi go dark so he could send free power to a factory that, allegedly, the President’s relatives owned.

Leroy: No one sees the bigger picture. It’s so self-serving.

Devlin: That’s a Georgian characteristic, actually: They don’t really have a sense of planning for the future because they’ve been conquered so often throughout history, because they are a small country and it’s a really geopolitically important area — and so their method of survival was to milk the conqueror. They say, ‘Okay, you’re going to conquer us, but now we’re going get as much out of you as we can while you’re here.’

And so they thrived in the Soviet era. Georgia was one of the most prosperous Soviet republics. And that’s where their culture of corruption got so highly developed, during the Soviet times. And the terrible irony of independence was that they lost all the prosperity, because the corruption continued and just ate away at them from the inside. And now they are a failed state. So when they see these Americans come along, they say, “Okay, let’s make some money!” [laughs ]

And so the shame is, even though the Americans were there to make money themselves of course, they also seemed to have good intentions, they wanted to build an infrastructure; they wanted to make the system work. But the Georgians, having thousands of years of this history of milking the foreigner, couldn’t see the opportunity to build anything, they just saw it as an opportunity to pocket a lot of money from these silly Americans. And Power Trip is about the comedy and the tragedy of that disconnect.

Leroy: It reminds me so much of the small economies of West Virginia, of the south and things like that. There’s pockets of that in the United States that are very familiar to me. To have a whole country based on that… What’s also amazing is to see the impact that Enron had on the global economy.

Devlin: Yeah, it’s amazing the ripples there. AES didn’t have any scandals of their own, though they were probably spending too much during the late ’90s bubble. But the Enron scandal just devastated stock prices throughout the entire energy industry. So suddenly AES has no more money to invest in Georgia and shareholders want them to pull out and the Georgians are worried no one will ever invest in them again. Enron had ripples that affected Georgia, half way around the world. True globalization.

Leroy: Are AES Corp. still there?

Devlin: I’m going to let people buy a ticket to the movie to find that out. I’ll just say that we had to change the end of the film this summer [2003].

Leroy: When you were filming riots and stuff, as an identifiable American, did you ever get worried?

Devlin: Sometimes I got worried. A couple times I was asked to stop shooting when I was near the Presidential offices. But generally, I didn’t have much trouble. I worked alone with a small mini-DV camera, so I think I was under the radar.

But there were a couple of moments. During the street demonstrations, big groups of kids would get whipped up into a scary frenzy because of my camera and start pulling at me and the camera until I put it down and walked away. And there was one moment out when I was shooting at night showing how dark things were. A car stopped and four big beefy guys got out and I thought, uh oh, I’m in trouble. [laughs ] But they turned out to be policemen and they were telling me to get off the street because there had been some tourists who had gotten beaten up in the area recently, so they were more protecting me.

When I first got to Georgia though, my first hour in the country I got robbed by policemen.

Leroy: What happened?

Devlin: I had come in from Turkey, and I hired a car to take me to Tbilisi, and we were up in the hills, and [this policeman] stopped the car and basically hassled me and threatened to arrest me. I had a customs certificate on me that said that I had $1,600 on me, and he wanted it! So we just argued back and forth for about half an hour and then finally I pulled out my wallet and he took the 40 or 50 bucks that was in there. So that was that.

Now, being more familiar with the country, I probably wouldn’t have given him any money, because I know that the cops stop cars all the time, that’s how the policemen make their living actually, because salaries are so low, it is sort of expected of them to stop cars and pick up money from people at random. And that was encouraged in the Soviet time, because the salaries were low, but you had this position and the opportunity to go out and make it, so go out and make it. And if you are a cop, you stop cars. If you are the Energy Minister, you send electricity for free to your buddies at a factory, you know. That was ingrained in the culture.

Leroy: What about Piers, he goes into all these situations …

Devlin: Yeah, Piers was concerned about kidnapping, because kidnapping is sort of almost an industry in Georgia. There’s a tradition in the mountains of men kidnapping women to be their wives, and in Tbilisi they kidnap businessmen and hold them for ransom, and that’s happening a lot. And so he was worried about that. People would get taken up North to the Pankisi Gorge, where apparently there are a lot of Chechen rebels and that kind of thing going on.

Leroy: Isn’t that the area where the Americans suspected Al Qaeda operatives to be hiding out as well?

Devlin: Yeah, we mention that in the movie. That’s where they think a lot of terrorists are hanging out. There’s been connections with Al Qaeda at the Pankisi Gorge. Whether or not that’s true, who knows? But the U.S. sent in troops to try to help that area, and apparently there were a lot of Chechen rebels. I think the Georgian government has been trying to clean it out now. But apparently, the kidnap victims are being held in that area.

And so Piers is pretty high profile and it’s clear he’s making a Western salary, so anybody in that position has to be concerned about kidnapping.

Leroy: What did he do to protect himself?

Devlin: Piers is unusual. I think Piers’s strategy is to make himself as Georgian as possible. When I would go there, people would say, well, Piers is Georgian. [laughs ] He learned the language, he knew the slang, he was friends with everybody.

Leroy: As an Englishman talking the language, that guy’s brain is amazing.

Devlin: Yeah, he knows 5 or 6 languages, and that’s the thing about Piers is that he’d learn it differently than other people — he would come at it learning the language from the people, and he would get their expressions and their slang, and he’s just a very friendly character. He just goes up and meets people. And so I think that was more his solution rather than having bodyguards, which is another solution. He just ingratiated himself to the people.

Leroy: Could you talk a little bit about news reporter who was killed in the film.

Devlin: Giorgi Sanaya was a news reporter for Rustavi-2, the independent television station in Tbilisi. He was doing investigative journalism for Rustavi-2, and he was assassinated in his home, and his assassin was never caught, the reason was never discovered, but a lot of people assume that it was because he was investigating the Pankisi Gorge where a lot of the kidnappings were taking place. And the rumor was that he had a videotape that showed law enforcement officials working with some of the people who were doing the kidnapping. Whether or not that’s true we may never know.

Leroy: Sounds about right, though.

Devlin: I think it’s unlikely that it’s just a random shooting which is how it was characterized by some people, including President Shevardnadze.

Leroy: How did you go about getting funding for this film?

Devlin: Well, funding for independent documentaries in the U.S. is pretty difficult. I sought funding from the Soros Documentary Fund, [which is now the Sundance Documentary Fund], the MacArthur Foundation, all the usual suspects, and was rejected out of hand everywhere.

I think this is a very difficult film to pitch. “So, you’re going to do a movie about the Georgian electricity sector. Why would anyone be interested in that?” And once you see Power Trip , you understand why it’s so interesting. But to try to do that on paper is a tough pitch. I made a strong effort with a really good proposal, I actually hired a grant writer, but got nothing. And to try to get private sources for this is also difficult in a market for independent documentaries where it’s very unlikely you’re going to profit.

So, if you get no outside funding, at some point you have to make a choice: quit or keep going on your own. I wound up self-financing. And I did that with my last film SlamNation as well, and I’m hoping that we can break even on Power Trip .

Leroy: And what are you doing with it now?

Devlin: Right now we’re doing very well with international sales. Our sales agent and international distributor is Jan Rofekamp with Films Transit International and he’s doing very well with sales overseas. We’ve sold to the BBC and I’m told there are over 20 other international sales. In fact, he’s characterized Power Trip as a worldwide best-seller at this point. So Europeans get it! [laughs ]

The U.S. market is a little trickier. We are talking to domestic distributors, but not all those deals are great, and I want to try to make some money on it, so we have to continue to negotiate to see if we can get a good deal in the United States. Same with U.S. television. If you don’t hit the jackpot with HBO, where there is serious money, the options diminish precipitously after that.

So the next step is Sundance Channel, PBS, and those kinds of markets and then you’re talking anywhere from $15 - $30,000 if you’re lucky, if you do very, very well, maybe you’re talking $40 - $60,000. And this is for a low budget non-fiction film that is going to cost you anywhere from $100 - $200,000. And that’s with a lot of favors and a lot of in-kind services. If you were to really budget it, it would be more like $350 - $400,000. So, if you’re counting on making money, you’re in the wrong business, because the market for independent documentaries is pretty much unsustainable. Sort of like the electricity market in Georgia.

We’ve been booking the film ourselves in theaters. We have a Film Forum run in New York on December 10 - 23, and we’re going to be playing in Santa Monica, Pasadena, San Francisco, a few others. If the Film Forum does well, we expect to be able to book a lot more cities.

I don’t think many independent films make much money theatrically, but I think with the international TV sales, we’re going to do well. A lot of corporations and financial institutions are contacting us about in-house screenings, which is a nice perk. And if we can find our way in the domestic market, especially the educational and institutional video market, we’ll be in good shape. Maybe I’ll even break even. Not bad for a non-fiction film about the Georgian electricity sector.

Links:

Power Trip

AES Corp.

CIA — The World Factbook — Georgia

“Russian Control Over Energy Raises Questions About Georgia’s Direction”

“Georgia: Situation In Pankisi Gorge Raises Tension, Speculation”

“New Georgia leader calls for Order”