Almost Holy

This amazing and disturbing documentary, "Almost Holy," about a Ukrainian Pentecostal priest, Gennadiy Mokhnenko, who started an outreach home for abandoned children, especially those on the streets, their (usually) drug-or-alcoholic addicted parents, and others in desperate need of help.

Part soldier, part policeman, part father, Mokhnenko exposes pharmacists who illegally supply addicts with drugs that kill them faster than alcohol, as well as others -- including children, politicians who look the other way, the addicts themselves -- using television news and chat programs to gain attention to his work.

Apparently he's been a force in Ukraine since 2008, so in many newsreels and television appearances he is captured haranguing, using blunt force, and generally making a pest of himself to get badly-needed help to the children, especially in his combination of orphanage, hospital and work-camp, Pilgrim House, by bestowing basic love, food and self-reliance on these abandoned and damaged ones.

One such child, a boy of perhaps 12, comes to him for survival, only to succumb later to the diseases his heroin-use had brought on; we see him getting better, then lowered into a gravesite. Tears will afflict those sensitive to children's needs and the uselessness of their deaths spurred on by battle-hardened authorities. The same is true with a mentally-disturbed young deaf woman, raped by her abductor, bearing him a child that was taken away by the authorities; she slips from her savior's hands to marry this fiend.

The priest is unflinching in his moral condemnation of his nation falling apart as Putin's Russia threatens Ukraine's very existence. Accused of grand-standing by the folk in charge, Mokhnenko keeps himself in physical shape, and in a strong emotional strength by living his religion. If there is a downside to his altruism, especially in taking too strong a moral high ground, we don't see that. In fact, his fanaticism (if that is what it is) is badly needed, and his refusal to give into emotive exhaustion is truly miraculous.

Clocking in at a little more than an hour and a half, this well-made doc by American documentarian Steve Hoover does a bang-up job of making this gem of a human realistically profound, as well as a manly action-activist. The Ukrainian title, "Crocodile Gennadiy," is taken from a children's stop-action animation series by the same name, another way Hoover humanize him for children. Hoover's Americanized title, "Almost Holy" is a line Mokhnenko uses about himself. Both are appropriate.

By all means, see this when you can.