An animation film backed by the Russian government and church is in production, putting Skye on the front line of a new propaganda cold war.
The movie – “Kids against the Sorcerers” – pitches patriotic and devoutly Orthodox Christian Russian school children in to a terrifying battle with occultist Scots backed by Nato navies.
A trailer for the movie has sparked a social media furore in Russia as it shows teens in Bond-style mini helicopters flying over Skye’s Quiraing to tackle “the enemy.”
The film depicts a war between a kind of patriotic junior KGB and a gang of Harry Potters who have turned evil.
Its critics see it as crude Stalinist propaganda, with a sinister undercurrent of McCarthyite paranoia.
Its creator reckons it is “just a fairy tale” and dismisses the negative response as the bile of “people who just sit at home and criticise because they have nothing better to do.”
Glasgow University’s Ammon Cheskin is one of those alarmed by an eight-minute clip, complete with jingoist commentary from a former KGB officer.
“I have never seen anything quite like this,” Dr Cheskin said. “This looks like a crass film. It talks about people who speaks like Russians and look like Russians but who, in their souls, are not Russian. This sounds Stalinist. The trailer has people taking about ‘internal enemies’.”
The book it is based on has cadets from Moscow’s elite Suvorov military school being sent on a secret mission to a Scottish island called “Loch Horrog” to rescue Russian children whoi are being brainwashed in to the occult by Harry Potter.
JK Rowling’s boy wizard may be as popular in Russia as anywhere else but for a certain kind of conservative and patriotic Russian Orthodox priest he represents a sinister threat to both faith and the motherland.
Potter himself has been dropped from the movie of the book. But, according to the trailer, the Scottish baddies still buzz about on broomsticks in a castle on Loch Horrog that is a very thinly disguised Hogwarts.
The film is being made by Russian director Nikolai Mazurov, who says “no way is this propaganda – it’s just a fairy tale.”
