A film about Yandex

The story of a film about the Russian IT-industry will be written by The Island scriptwriter.

The history of Yandex and the Russian IT-industry will become the basis for a film with the working title Startup. Roman Karimov (Inadequate people, Vdrebezgi) will be the film Director, Irina Smolko (20 cigarettes) will be producer. The scriptwriter will be Dmitry Sobolev, known for his work for the film The Island and Peremirie. According to Irina Smolko, the film will cover the entire history of the Russian IT-industry since the 90's, paying special attention to Yandex.

We have an example of IPO, which can be the envy of Facebook. This is really a great success, and after meeting Yandex management I understand from where it is developing, - she said. Startup cast is not announced yet.

Yandex is the largest IT-company in Russia in terms of revenue. It was established as a separate company by Arkady Volozh and Ilya Segalovich in 2000. Yandex is the most popular search engine in RuNet occupying about 60% of the market. The share of Google - the main competitor of the domestic company - is about 25.5%. In May 2011, Yandex conducted a successful IPO on NASDAQ exchange in the United States.


lookatme.ru portal contacted Ilya Segalovich, one of the Yandex founders and the current director of technology and development:

We did not order this film and we are not the initiators of filming, moreover the film creators say that this film is not about us, but about the Internet in general. We can not stop the process, because, first of all, do not want to start a fray, and secondly – it is a senseless sort of thing. At first, we did spoke about similar issues, but again, I’ll repeat, it was not initiated by us: we were asked - we answered something. So we are aside of this project and do not want to associate ourselves with it. Creativity and real life have a right not to have anything in common. Most unfortunately, I have not seen the works of this director and scriptwriter, so I have no idea about the result of filming. But it seems to me that the filmmakers do not mean the plot or intrigue, but psychology. Will I watch such a movie? I do not know. Frankly speaking, I do not know, I'm afraid to be disappointed.