Azernews.Az

A lone heroine fights off giant monsters and sinister masked warriors in ``August 8``, a Kremlin-funded blockbuster that gives the Russian view of the country`s 2008 war with Georgia.

Almost entirely financed by the government, the film came out after Georgia last year backed a Hollywood version starring Andy Garcia as its president Mikheil Saakashvili.

Izvestia daily praised the film, which depicts a young Muscovite`s search for her son around the town of Tskhinvali in South Ossetia -- a breakaway region of Georgia -- after both unwittingly stray into the war zone, as a ``symmetrical response to Hollywood.``

Hundreds died in the brief war beginning August 8 that saw Russian forces pour into neighbouring Georgia to repel Tbilisi`s attempt to retake the Kremlin-backed rebel region.

Bursting with special effects, the war is sometimes shown through the eyes of the woman`s traumatised and injured child as a battle between benevolent smiling robots and scaly monsters.

President Dmitry Medvedev recently praised ``August 8`` for keeping the memory of the war alive and reinforcing the view that Georgia was first to attack.

``The film has a very important mission to tell the truth,`` he said.

``We didn`t give ourselves the task of setting out any political accents. We wanted to make a film about a sweet girl, about her heroic journey, about how she tried to find her life, to find herself,`` he told AFP.

But Russia is still aggrieved at international support for Georgia and its vehemently pro-Western leader Saakashvili over the brief but bloody conflict, and the film was financed by a fund that promotes patriotic cinema.

Sergei Tolstikov, the CEO of the Cinema Fund, set up by the government to support national films, told AFP the film cost over $10 million, and that the fund gave ``around 90 percent.``

On its first weekend, the film came second in the box office to US action film ``Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance,`` making $4.8 million on 1,500 screens across the country, according to ProfiCinema website.

The subject is inevitably political, Tolstikov said.

``We`re not going to pretend that these events took place in a fantasy country,`` he said.

``It was a very complex and difficult time, and there is a political element. Many of our peacemakers and citizens died. This affected the country very strongly. When these guys came to us with this idea, it would have been wrong to say no.``

The film has scenes starring Russian President Medvedev (played by big-shouldered hunk Vladimir Vdovichenkov) and square-jawed Russian troops who laugh at danger and love their mothers.

Saakashvili, who was demonised by Russian media during the war, is nowhere in sight.e director said he deliberately did not show Georgians` faces because he believes rank-and-file troops were not to blame for the conflict.