In February 2026, a foundation called Cinema for Peace held a gala dinner at Berlin’s Hotel Adlon, arguably the city’s fanciest venue. Hosted by Bob Geldof and featuring a keynote speech by Hillary Clinton, the gala awarded prizes for “International Green Film” or “The Most Valuable Documentary of the Year.” On the red carpet, the step and repeat backdrop asked, “Will democracy / will humankind / will the planet survive?”
Besides Clinton and Geldof, guests included WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the South African activist Albie Sachs, and Nobel Prize winners Rebecca Johnson and Tawakkol Karman, as well as Hollywood figures like Kevin Spacey. Auctions were held for tickets to a private meeting with Clinton, teatime with Geldof, and Elton John’s Oscars party. The glitz and glamor of the evening were further elevated by a live orchestra made up of Ukrainian musicians.
Cinema for Peace was founded by a German businessman named Jaka Bizilj. Over the years, Cinema for Peace has presented dozens of such charitable events and fundraisers, bringing together film industry celebrities and prominent politicians. Clinton attended the gala in 2024 and served as its honorary chairwoman in February 2026. (A lawyer representing Bizilj told VAN that the businessman is not a member of the Cinema for Peace board of directors.)
Among the awardees this year was Roman Oleksiv. He was seven years old when, in 2022, a Russian missile attack destroyed the hospital in Vinnytsia where he and his mother were waiting for an appointment, killing her and leaving him with extensive burns. He was treated in Dresden, where his unlikely recovery left him with a scarred face and turned him into something of an ambassador for victims of the war. (Oleksiv was awarded the “Future of Ukraine” award by Volodymyr Zelenskyy in 2025.) At the Berlin gala in February, Oleksiv and the director Evgeny Afineevsky were awarded an Honorary Dove for the film “Children in the Fire.”
After Oleksiv’s speech and the awarding of the prize, the microphone was handed to Clinton. “This is such an emotional moment,” she said, standing among the string section of the orchestra. “Thinking about all the children who have been killed and injured by all the wars that we are now seeing across the world, it should be a wakeup call, a reminder, that this is insanity, people.”
Many Ukrainian musicians, who at one point flanked Bizilj on stage, were used to a different form of insanity. For them, the gala was just one stop on a series of allegedly grueling, chaotic tours across Europe, playing film music night after night for the Berlin-based company Star Entertainment GmbH, and Lancelot Productions LDA, a firm based in Portugal.
According to information available on North Data, a search engine for European company records, Bizilj was managing director at Star Entertainment between 2004 and 2024, when he was replaced by Maja Car. He retains a 95% stake in the company. Bizilj’s lawyer told VAN that Bizilj “is the proprietor of Star Entertainment GmbH, but hasn’t been managing director for years.”
North Data records state that Bizilj owns a 100% stake in Lancelot Productions LDA, of which Maja Car Vuksinic was managing director between 2024 and 2026. (It is not clear from the records whether this refers to the same person as the Maja Car from Star Entertainment.) Bizilj “is neither proprietor nor managing director of Lancelot Productions LDA,” his lawyer said. (An earlier Lancelot Productions job posting appears to call for applications to be Bizilj’s executive assistant. Sources described him as regularly involved with the company’s operations in the past.)
In a months-long investigation, VAN spoke with 20 musicians, technical staff, producers, and other employees and freelancers at those two companies. Twelve others didn’t respond to interview requests or declined to comment. Those who spoke to VAN described a maelstrom of stress and pressure behind the scenes. Their stories posit a contradiction between Bizilj’s public persona as a philanthropist standing at the side of suffering Ukrainians and a ruthless businessman willing to exploit vulnerable people to maximize profit. And it wasn’t limited to Ukrainian musicians: seemingly anyone who touched his companies would be subject to their chaos, at times with perilous consequences.
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On July 30, 2024, an actor we’ll call Elton received an intriguing offer through his agent. Would he like to join Hans Zimmer on stage for a touring musical show?
Elton, who asked for anonymity fearing professional repercussions, traveled to Germany that December for rehearsal. It soon became clear that the show had nothing to do with Zimmer himself. Instead, it combined some of the composer’s famous film scores with what Elton described as “poor resolution clips pulled off the internet, and AI.”
The show was put on by Lancelot Productions. Besides its “The Music of Hans Zimmer” performance, the company produces live musical shows based on major motion pictures like “The Lord of the Rings” and “Star Wars.”
In these concerts, small and often audibly under-rehearsed orchestras perform medleys of well-known works—frequently with a backing track and in some cases an audible click-track. Unlike today’s popular “playalong” concerts (where an orchestra performs the full score to accompany a screening of a film), these shows cobble together clips and other video material with soundtrack medleys and related music. Hosts like Elton are brought in to find a thread between loosely related pieces, to perform magic tricks and other gimmicks, and to try and get the audience to participate in sing-alongs.
Results are mixed. “If you have the top tier of performers, it can be a great show,” Elton said. But, he added, there can also be “nightmare collisions.”
A reviewer in Linz, Austria who saw a Pink Floyd show wrote, “for 50 euros, we got about a two-hour concert, which went by quickly thanks to the super vibe and excellent musical accomplishments.” A person in Munich who attended a “Harry Potter” show complained that “although the Ukrainian orchestra was solid, the show consisted mainly of cheap-seeming and obviously AI-generated fantasy visuals without a true ‘Harry Potter’ atmosphere. Many of the musical pieces were played briefly or as part of a medley.” Performers could be equally critical: One Ukrainian musician said that a Lancelot Productions performance based on “The Lion King” in Innsbruck, Austria, was the most embarrassing show of his life.
Between the winter of 2024 and the spring of 2026, Elton toured 14 countries with the company. But as the tours went on, he grew increasingly concerned about working conditions. For one, the van he shared with some singers was having trouble making it up hills. In April 2025, he contacted a talent manager with a different complaint: On a day with two shows and at least three hours of travel, no provisions had been made for food, and the artists didn’t have time to organize it on their own.
“On behalf of the crew, the orchestra and the performers,” he texted, “can someone please remind the people responsible for these plans, and these decisions, that we are human beings.”
Things only deteriorated further. Around 1:30 p.m. on March 16, 2026, Elton was riding in the touring van on the highway from Italy to Lichtenstein when a strange smell filled the car. The clutch was burning.
The driver threw up his hands. “Car is kaputt,” he said.
Using the momentum the car still had, the driver pulled over to the shoulder. He steered the vehicle onto a nearby exit, coming to a stop in a parking lot. But the car was finished and they were stuck.
Elton attempted to contact several people at the company, including the talent manager. “This is an emergency,” he wrote.
When she responded, three and a half hours later and after 14 texts, 12 missed calls and two voice messages from Elton, the talent manager wrote that she was not responsible for such problems, and that she was off work anyway.
“There are a million other people in the company who can help with issues like this,” she wrote. “I am trying to get them to help.”
Eventually, Elton and the others handled the situation themselves. They ordered an Uber and booked hotel rooms in the nearby town of Annecy, France. They found a bar and restaurant and used the cash they’d been given for gas to buy food and drink. They had “a fairly shell-shocked meal all together,” Elton said, then gathered around a piano in the bar and made music. A South African soloist sang Sinatra’s “My Way.”
“It was kind of a great night,” Elton said. “Definitely weird—but there was also very much a sense of relief too, in terms of just finally having got to this point of, ‘No, fuck this.’”
Employees said that Bizilj owns a penthouse in an upscale neighborhood of Berlin. “It’s a super nice flat,” an employee who once had dinner there said. “But it stands completely empty. There’s just this big table, a big, super expensive piano. And then a huge photo on the wall of him shaking hands with Hillary Clinton.” (Clinton did not respond to a request for comment.)
With unremarkable suits and the whiff of consultancy about him, Bizilj cuts an unassuming figure. Still, he has successfully cultivated a public image as a philanthropist and advocate for liberal causes, democracy, and human rights by making spaces for concerns to be voiced.
This idea proved popular. Cinema for Peace’s fundraisers have become a key Berlin center for socially conscious celebrities seeking to flaunt their progressive credentials and ingratiate themselves with international politicians, diplomats, and religious leaders. Sean Penn received an award from the foundation in 2011; in 2024, Ban Ki-moon attended the premiere of a documentary about his life at a Cinema for Peace event, while Bill Clinton was honored as “Peacemaker of the Century” in 2025. The website carries endorsements from Angelina Jolie and George Clooney. One photo on a Foundation social media profile features Bizilj in conversation with Tom Hanks and Mikhail Gorbachev over an impressive platter of tropical fruit.
On occasion, these organizations’ words have turned into actions. In 2020, Bizilj, supported by his foundation, ran an operation to airlift dissident Alexei Navalny out of Russia to receive treatment in Berlin. He did the same thing with Pyotr Verzilov, co-founder of Pussy Riot, when Verzilov was the victim of a suspected poisoning two years previously.
But his philanthropy appears to be mostly talk—and talk is cheap. Online, The World Forum, which Bizilj founded, boasts its credentials: involving “over one billion participants” including “over a hundred Academy Award-winning artists; more than 30 heads of states, 100 ministers and elected officials; as well as icons of humankind and a better future such as Nelson Mandela, The Dalai Lama, Muhammad Ali, and Mikhail Gorbachev.” In that time, it boasts, it raised “more than $10 million” from this cast of A-listers. That’s a surprisingly paltry rate of around $500,000 a year. (By comparison, a contemporary art auction led by Bono and Damien Hirst raised $42 million to battle HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria on a single night in 2008.)
Besides Cinema for Peace and The World Forum, Bizilj also founded The Court of the Citizens of the World. Ukraine was a key topic of debate in the court, which found Vladimir Putin guilty of “crimes of aggression in Ukraine.” (Unlike the International Criminal Court in The Hague, it has no jurisdiction to prosecute individuals for such crimes.) The World Forum, meanwhile, began giving out the “Noble Prize.” (“Despite a similar sounding name,” the website notes, “The Noble Award is not associated with Alfred Nobel.”)
In 2023, the Cinema for Peace Award went to an unusual trio: Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, filmmaker Evgeny Afineevsky, and Pope Francis, around Afineevsky’s film “Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom.” “Evgeny, as a filmmaker has documented what unites all three honorees,” Bizilj said, “the quest for freedom and peace for the people of Ukraine.”
In October 2025, a young Ukrainian musician from a region particularly hard-hit by the Russian invasion arrived in Warsaw. (We’ll call him Oles.) He was booked for a tour to the United States and Canada a few weeks later and had come to apply for his work visa.
Soon after his arrival, Oles (who spoke with VAN on condition of anonymity because he hopes he will eventually be paid), was informed that the tour had been postponed to January. In the meantime, they assigned him to concerts in Germany, playing music from the “Star Wars” and “James Bond” film franchises, among others. He said the concerts were performed without rehearsal, but he “tried to do my job the best that I could,” he said.
Oles found the tours stressful and badly organized, but, like many Ukrainian musicians, he needed the work. On the U.S. tour, though, which finally took place in early 2026, conditions became hard to manage. According to a tour schedule obtained by VAN, in one two-day period over Easter, he was planned for five different shows in Dubuque, Iowa. The following day, marked “Day Off,” he and the other musicians traveled by bus to Guelph, in Ontario, Canada—a ten-hour journey—then were set for two more shows the next day. The schedule shows at least 48 concerts in the month of March.
At one point, the musicians’ visas were on the verge of expiration, with little information about plans to renew them forthcoming, and Oles worried about staying in the United States illegally.
At the beginning of April, the company informed him that his pay would be docked by €500 per month, he said, from €2,500 per month to €2,000. The reason? They had failed to obtain visas for some musicians to perform in Canada and had to cancel about a dozen concerts.
For artists on tour with Lancelot Productions and Star Entertainment, eating was a constant concern. Tight schedules made it difficult for performers and staff to find the time to buy food. And that was if they had the money—some had no savings and were dependent on fees from the company that often arrived late, if at all, for their meals. Cooks generally toured with the musicians, but they had limited budgets: In one message, a tour manager cited a budget of €350 per day for food—for a whole orchestra. Sometimes these cooks arrived at venues only to realize there was nowhere for them to prepare meals. In those cases, the musicians sometimes ordered pizzas to split on their own dime. But finding both time and money to eat remained difficult: A Ukrainian musician said he had a colleague who nearly fainted on stage from hunger.
Late payments were another problem for Oles. He said he was never paid the last two months of his salary, money he desperately needed. “Where is your humanity?” he wrote in one message to an employee at Lancelot Productions, adding, “I will stay homeless soon because of this company.”
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He said that management didn’t respond to his queries and that he is still waiting for his pay. But in July, he did receive an email from the company—reminding him that he had signed a non-disclosure agreement. “Any public communication which breaches the confidentiality provisions of your contract or otherwise causes reputational or financial harm to the production may constitute a breach of contract,” it read, signed only by the “Lancelot Legal Team.”
He said he is still waiting for over €4,000 in back pay. He texted Bizilj about this money. The businessman wrote, “Please send the contract you had for [the] USA to the person who signed it and inform who paid you how much.” (Oles’s orchestra was not contracted by Lancelot Productions or Star Entertainment GmbH, but a Delaware-based company called Star Entertainment USA Inc.) When Oles insisted, Bizilj wrote, “You must be confusing me with another person,” then blocked him.
Another Ukrainian musician said he is also owed more than €6,000; another, also over €4,000. All three told VAN they believe Bizilj’s public-facing advocacy for Ukrainians is a charade. “He uses Lancelot Music Productions for exploitation, then goes on to display his charity elsewhere,” one said. “At least that’s the feeling I get when I look at it.”
On December 15, 2021, 11 venues across Australia received letters from Warner Bros warning them that upcoming performances of “The Magical Music of Harry Potter” booked by Star Entertainment breached copyright. (VAN obtained emails exchanged by Star Entertainment and its lawyers and venues in Australia.)
The following day, Bizilj sent a batch email to all of the venues, instructing them to disregard the letters from Warner Bros and assuring them that he was “licencing our concerts … with music rights organisations.” “The audience is very enthusiastic about the concerts,” Bizilj concluded, “and gives every night a ten minute standing ovation.”
But the problems didn’t go away. On December 18, an employee at Star Entertainment began emailing Australian law firms seeking legal support. One firm, Thomson Geer, eventually sent letters to each of the planned venues rejecting the allegations made by Warner Bros and noting that they were considering counteraction for the threats. “Warner Bros’ allegations have never been proven,” read the letter, “and Star Entertainment has never been prevented from proceeding with its production of The Music of Harry Potter.”
At the same time, Star Entertainment was fighting an almost identical legal battle in Norway. In October 2021, Warner Bros sent a cease-and-desist letter to Star Entertainment, asking that they provide evidence that they hold the rights to perform concerts there and requesting that they alter their promotional images to reduce the impression that the events were officially associated with the “Harry Potter” franchise. On December 21, Warner Bros took Star Entertainment to court, seeking a preliminary injunction for the “marketing and holding of concerts in breach of the copyright act, the trademarks act and the marketing control act.” On February 11, 2022, the Oslo district court ruled in Warner Bros’s favor. Star Entertainment appealed this decision, but it was upheld in an urgent preliminary ruling on March 4.
The Thomson Geer letters assuring Australian venues that Warner Bros had never prohibited a Star Entertainment concert went out on February 4, 2022. A month later, Star Entertainment was barred from performing “Harry Potter” shows in Norway.
The courts in Norway also considered the question of what kinds of rights Star Entertainment had to obtain to perform the works. After a full appeal, the courts found on May 24, 2023, that the company had breached Norwegian copyright law, ruling that any adaptations needed Warner’s permission—paying licensing fees would only cover performances of the works in their original form. So what was actually being put on stage?
VAN reviewed scores used at Star Entertainment concerts. Some appeared to be original scores, but lacked complete copyright information, with only the original composer’s name on the score, including Nicholas Hooper and Alexandre Desplat. (One Desplat piece misspelled his name, with an additional “s” at the end.) Others were medleys, such as the score titled “Opening,” which combines “Hedwig’s Theme” and “Harry’s Wondrous World,” the series’ two main themes. Although most of the pieces on the soundtrack include parts of “Hedwig’s Theme,” the score does not match any of the released versions of the soundtrack.
One singer recalled that arrangements were juggled on the road, with changes made to suit the number of performers able to make it to each new venue. She described these arrangements as “very basic.” One score falsely attributes a composition by the Danish Tolkien Ensemble to Howard Shore. New arrangements were sometimes emailed to conductors and performers on the day of a performance, described as “emergency versions.”
“Tomorrow there will be a better one,” wrote an arranger in one email, before wishing the performers “toi toi toi.”
Former employees interviewed by VAN described Lancelot Productions and Star Entertainment companies as running in a state of chaos. They described late payments, missing payments, and retroactively docked payments. They received settlement offers and payment installment plans. They spoke of payments that were delayed until musicians refused to perform. In emails, the company offered employees who were owed money bonuses if they accepted work in the future. In August 2026, Lancelot Productions said it was conducting investigations into allegedly fraudulent invoices, which explained why payments were delayed in so many cases. (Many musicians considered the investigations spurious.)
The employees spoke of visa delays and last-minute travel plans. Some said they paid out of pocket for travels that were never reimbursed. Others complained of harsh travel conditions: One musician said that their group took a surprise overnight bus ride from Melbourne to Sydney (about nine hours) on an unheated school bus. Another time, around Christmas, a musician said the group arrived at a hotel to find that no rooms were booked. They decided to drive all night and sleep at the next destination instead. They spoke of stays at spartan hotels meant for construction workers on short term projects. They described extreme stress: There was “a point,” a tour manager who worked for the company said, “where I had like 450 messages per day [from] 450 different people.”
They described all-or-nothing demands. Neo Motaung, a South African singer who performed on tours of “The Lion King” and “The Music of Hans Zimmer,” said she was taking a few days off from a rigorous touring schedule at a friend’s place in France when she received a frantic evening text asking if she’d be available for an afternoon show the next day—in Germany. When Motaung resisted—the company was behind on her salary—she said she was summarily dismissed in the middle of a month. The company paid her half of the agreed-upon salary for that month, she told VAN.
They spoke of logistically incoherent tours. Emmanuel Hill, an instrumentalist who performed with the company’s “Dark Side of the Moon” and “The Wall” shows, told VAN he got the impression that Bizilj “sits at his big chair with a dartboard in front of him, and the dartboard is a map of the world. And he just goes, ‘Right. Bing. Where are we going tomorrow?’”
Despite the geographical chaos, there is a center to the Star Entertainment universe: a ground floor office in central Berlin. Four former employees described it as the workplace equivalent of the “this is fine” meme. “I really had the impression of an entire office kind of running around like chickens with their heads cut off at the whim of this guy,” said John Zuckerman, who worked for Star Entertainment in the fall of 2021.
Based on reports by former workers, a hypothetical prospective employee—let’s call her Hillary—might see a job as a production manager at Star Entertainment advertised on LinkedIn on a Monday. Hillary might be hired the same day and given a start date, but then be expected to start working in advance—in the guise of a travel day or trial week. When she’d arrive at the Star Entertainment offices, she’d immediately be expected to start work on a tour on the other side of the world, booking equipment, instruments, venues or musicians. “I came in and they sat me on a desk and it was instantly, from the very first day, like, ‘OK, you have to make sales today, otherwise [Bizilj] is going to call you at the end of the day and he’s going to yell at you,” recalled a former office employee. (Bizilj’s lawyer said that he has not worked in Berlin for years.)
Ambitious targets might be made for Hillary and monitored in meetings three times a day: 8:50 a.m., 11:30 a.m., and 5 p.m. In those online meetings, she might see colleagues, some reliant on employment to remain in Germany, in various states of agitation about meeting their goals. As many as eight people might be assigned to the same tasks, all managed in constantly pinging WhatsApp group chats. Hillary might also see colleagues across time zones, like a travel agent from Kyiv who would share videos of Russian bombardments taken from his balcony. Her co-workers would be similarly fresh or soon to be fired. “In the time that I was there, there were definitely 20 to 30 people who were fired, both in the office and on tour,” said Dennis Schwarz, who worked for the companies as a sound engineer and project manager. (He said they still owe him over €22,000.)
Given the intense micro-management, “all in” work culture, and imminent threat of being fired, Hillary might wisely decide that she’d had enough. But it’s not as simple as working a notice period. When Zuckerman quit, after barely three weeks, a Star Entertainment employee told him she would only pay his invoice if he signed an NDA. “If you’ve published negative notices on the internet or in the media,” she wrote, “please delete them.” Even still, Hillary might continue to receive messages from Bizilj, name-dropping celebrities and telling her what a big opportunity she was passing up. But not every firing seemed to be meant literally: One employee spoke of a colleague who had lost count of how many times he had been sacked.
Financially, the businesses appear to be doing well. They have up to six tours running at once, one employee said. While revenue data for Lancelot Productions Productions is not publicly available, North Data records state that Star Entertainment had €14.7 million in revenue in 2023 and €8.7 million in 2024. It made a profit of €1,347,554 in 2023 and €687,526 in 2024, though its earnings were more modest before then, and it lost money in the pandemic years of 2021 and 2022.
Tours are frequently canceled or postponed. This summer, VAN bought two tickets for their “Lord of the Rings” show in Fürstenwalde, near Berlin, for €85.93. Then a Ukrainian musician on that tour told VAN that everyone had been sent home after four shows. “The concert you’re visiting isn’t going to happen,” he said. Two days before the performance, VAN was notified via email that it had been delayed until August 2027.
A browse of any online review platform quickly reveals dozens of frustrated customers who have struggled to receive refunds for postponed or canceled shows, and employees have described Bizilj’s obsession with his balance sheets, alleging he pushes shows back until they sell enough tickets to turn a profit.
Star Entertainment’s non-disclosure agreement includes a clause stating that because the company “performs humanitarian work that is sabotaged by trolls from foreign states, mostly in the name of allegedly former employees, it is agreed that no public reviews or statements will be made.” The same argument is rolled out to explain the negative online reviews, while also blaming those reviews for cashflow issues that delay invoice payments.
When the pandemic hit, Star Entertainment benefited handsomely from government assistance: €1,315,808 in 2021 and €251,522 in 2023. But nine employees who spoke with VAN said they were owed money from either Star Entertainment or Lancelot Productions—especially when they no longer had the leverage of threatening not to perform. “The only way you can get paid is if you use that,” said a South African singer.
That singer said she is currently owed over €6,000. Others said they were owed anywhere from €3,000 to Schwarz’s €22,000. An anonymous website called Star Shaming collects claims of unpaid bills. (The site’s operator is known to VAN, and we reviewed the claims submitted to it. Several independently corroborated claims by other sources.) The website alleges that Star Entertainment and Lancelot Productions owe musicians, crew members, suppliers, and audience members who never received their ticket refunds over €500,000—roughly the amount that Cinema for Peace claims to raise in a year.
The evening the van’s clutch burned on the highway—before the cathartic dinner and singing—Elton, the actor, texted Bizilj. He told him he was withdrawing from his work with the company, citing the close call on the road, persistent payment issues, and “the complete lack of care or concern demonstrated by our talent manager over this incident.”
“I’m sure as a human rights advocate you will be as horrified by this as we were,” Elton texted.
“I produced some [of] the shows,” Bizilj answered, “but I am not running the business or daily matters. I am sure there are competent people to resolve problems.”
When Elton got those messages, “my blood just boiled,” he said.
He kept writing, but Bizilj had already blocked him.
Like many people VAN spoke to, Elton has come to doubt that human rights are Bizilj’s real concern. Looking back at his time working for Bizilj’s companies left a bitter aftertaste in his mouth. “Giving legitimacy to Jaka, filling his pockets with insane revenue, and watching him turn around and just completely fuck over all the people who were working so hard to make him this money in the first place—it started to feel really gross,” Elton said.
Elton has other ways of earning money—both as an actor and in various day jobs. But not everyone feels as free. Bizilj “is just using us and that’s all,” a Ukrainian musician said. “Everyone knows it and we know it, but we can’t do anything.” ¶
Some identifying details have been changed.
Additional reporting: Hugh Morris, Les Vynogradov
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