What has happened
On the night of 16 August a near-final cut of Iron Wings: Klow Squadron, a production made in cooperation with the Royal Syldavian Air Force, was stolen from the systems of its makers and placed on the public networks, accompanied by a demand that the film be withdrawn from release. In the days since, a second and altered version has been circulated, assembled by artificial means to suggest that the film is an imitation of foreign work. The technical attribution is a matter for the relevant authorities, and the Consulate will not get ahead of them. It will say only that the methods used are consistent with the cyber-attack on the Ministry of Fiscal Oversight earlier this year, and that the indications point, as they did then, beyond the Kingdom's northern frontier.
What the Consulate wishes to make plain
The theft of a film is a crime. The forging of one, in order to call a nation's artists thieves, is something meaner, and it deserves to be named for what it is rather than argued with on its own terms. A fabrication designed to be shared before it can be checked relies on the good faith of the people who share it. Some Syldavians, in good faith, were briefly persuaded. The Consulate asks only that they extend the same good faith to one another, and reserve their judgement for the work itself, which the country's own specialists have already shown the forgery to misrepresent. To set the Kingdom's people against each other over a counterfeit is precisely the aim of the exercise. It would be a small tragedy to grant it.
The film will open as planned
Elsewhere in the world, threats of this kind have on occasion persuaded studios to withdraw a film and call it caution. Syldavia has chosen the other road. Iron Wings: Klow Squadron opens across the Kingdom on 26 August, on schedule, in every cinema that will have it. The Consulate cannot improve on the National Cinema Office's own words, and so it borrows them: the film is best seen on the largest screen one can find, in a room full of one's neighbours, where no forgery has ever known how to follow. To friends of Syldavia in Thailand and beyond, the Consulate extends its thanks for their concern, and a simple invitation. When the film reaches you, see it for yourselves.
