After graduating from college in the US, Eve Conant lived in Russia, working in a Mexican Restaurant half a block from the Kremlin. When she came home she told her high school friend Kia Simon all about her experiences, whereupon Kia said: "That's a movie."

A year later, they and their friend Jonathan Crosby decided to get off their asses and make that movie. Once in Moscow, Russia they looked around for the stories that could encapsulate the modern Moscow. They interviewed a Mary Kay saleswoman, a Russian businessman (read mafioso), an American entreprenuer with a million schemes. And yet everywhere they went to shoot b-roll, they would see Gagik.

They had footage of him at a rave, on Arbat street where a picture with him was about two dollars, and then they decided to ask him some questions. And what they found was that this one man embodied the changes in the former Soviet Union that they wanted to capture.

He stole the show and the film became "Looking for Sly."