MOSCOW: With artists from more than 20 countries and ambitions for a billion-plus viewers, Russia on Saturday revived its Intervision song contest, which Moscow hopes will compete with a “decadent” Eurovision.
First held in the Soviet era and relaunched in February on President Vladimir Putin’s orders, the concert-as-soft-power tool was held at an arena near the Russian capital, with Vietnamese singer Duc Phuc proclaimed the winner with a song inspired by a poem about bamboo.
The performer, who won the Vietnamese version of reality TV series “The Voice” 10 years ago, emotionally thanked the audience “for every second” spent watching the competition, which lasted around four hours.
With Russia banished from Eurovision, the song contest extravaganza born on the other side of the Iron Curtain, over its offensive in Ukraine, the Kremlin has pushed Intervision as a means to lay the anti-Western narratives on thick while striving for new cultural and political alliances.
The contest kicked off with an opening ceremony hitching future-looking technology to nostalgia for the Soviet past, before giant augmented-reality projections of dancing silhouettes in traditional costumes were displayed to represent each contestant.
