Almost Holy

Nicknamed "Crocodile" after a superheroic Soviet cartoon character, Gennadiy Mokhnenko cuts an uncompromising figure. The way he snatches abused and drug-addicted women and children off the streets of the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, he seems more like a gang master than a vigilante pastor. But Mokhnenko has dedicated himself to the Pilgrim Republic rehabilitation centre that he founded to save the waifs and strays that the embattled state's broken-down social service network could no longer protect. Along with his wife Lena, he has adopted and raised 32 children alongside his own three, while also rescuing alcoholics, runaways, abductees and rape victims. But not everyone wants to be saved and, in juxtaposing archive footage with his own observations and views of the grim industrial landscape, director Steve Hoover is careful to balance Mokhnenko's tough-love philanthropy and hot-dog-guzzling geniality with his messianic egotism and readiness to beat seven shades out of the paedophiles, pimps and corrupt pharmacists who prey on the abandoned and vulnerable.