Xan Brooks 

How to Re-Establish a Vodka Empire – review

This account of a businessman's attempt to reclaim his family distillery in Ukraine is a bit too much of a sales pitch itself, says Xan Brooks
  
  

how to re-establish a vodka empire
Way down east ... How to Re-Establish a Vodka Empire Photograph: PR

Daniel Edelstyn is the beaming, twittish descendant of wealthy White Russians who fled the homeland to escape the Bolsheviks. Now Edelstyn is going back, intercutting his own misadventures in the boardroom with staged re-enactments of his grandmother's fraught flight to the west. Our hero is on a mission to re-energise the old distillery and launch his own vodka brand in the UK; dragging a camera along for company and re-framing family history as eager-beaver marketing spiel. His film is amiable, flyweight, a glorified sales presentation with one eye on the Waitrose deal. I didn't buy it.

 

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