Newsnight feature on Viktor Vekselberg

Once again we worked with director Spike Geilinger on this commission for BBC Scotland. We cut The World’s Most Beautiful Eggs: The Genius of Carl Fabergé, a 60-minute BBC4 documentary about the legendary goldsmith.

BBC Newsnight were impressed enough with the result to commission a further recut for a 12-minute feature on Viktor Vekselberg, a businessman thought to be the richest person in Russia, who had recently acquired the world’s largest collection of world-famous Fabergé eggs.

The diamond-covered Easter eggs are an astounding testament to the wealth and power once commanded by the Russian tsars, and to the riches of the modern oligarchs of Russia. They are unbelievably intricate - one was designed to crack open to reveal a working model of the Russian state coach. Of roughly 50 eggs made for the imperial family between 1885 and 1916 by the jeweller Carl Fabergé, 42 have survived. Vekselberg owns fifteen of them.

We re-edited the original film to illustrate a voice-over specially recorded by Newsnight cultural correspondent Stephen Smith.