Hunter Biden was in the audience at a Saturday night screening and Q&A of “From Russia With Lev,” which was followed by a Q&A with executive producer Rachel Maddow, director Billy Corben and subjects Lev and Svetlana Parnas. The MSNBC documentary, airing on Sept. 20, features a surprising scene in which Biden and Parnas come face-to-face after Parnas admitted to creating false and damaging allegations against Biden on behalf of then-President Donald Trump. Though Biden did not speak publicly, he listened intently to the Q&A discussion and spoke privately with the participants after. The screening, which took place at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica, was sponsored by American Cinematheque.

The Ukrainian-American businessman targeted Biden because his father, Joe Biden, was considered by Trump to be his biggest obstacle to re-election in 2020. Parnas collaborated with Rudy Giuliani, and his actions led not only to his own imprisonment on several charges – including campaign finance and wire fraud – but also to Trump’s first impeachment.

“I’d never considered the human being before. I looked at him as a target,” Parnas admitted to the audience. “I never, never, ever sat down to think about what he was going through. What the Biden family was going through.” Parnas deeply wanted to apologize and clear Hunter Biden’s name, saying, “It was my mission to always make things right.”

Parnas says he conveyed his wish to apologize to a mutual friend, and Biden not only agreed to meet with him but also to allow the documentary crew to film it for the movie. Asked if he ever could have imagined such a meeting would take place, director Corben joked, “I’m still not certain.” He added, “If you had told me three-and-a-half years ago this documentary would end with Lev Parnas and Hunter Biden hugging it out, I would not have bet money on that.”

Corben went on to detail the logistics of the secretive meeting, which took place on July 7. “I barely put it on the calendar,” he revealed. After the date was locked, several curveballs came their way, including Hunter Biden’s felony convictions related to gun charges, the Biden-Trump debate and Joe Biden dropping out of the presidential race. Each time, Corben noted, “I said, ‘Well, obviously this isn’t going to happen.’” Even on the day of the scheduled meeting, he woke up to a text message from Biden asking Corben to call him, and the director was sure the interview was falling through. “He said, ‘No, I just want to confirm the time, the location and everything,’” Corben recalled. “And we had a really interesting conversation about addiction, which I had in my immediate family.”

To this day, Corben is in awe that it occurred, stating, “Why Hunter Biden did it – I would leave that story to him to tell some day.”

Corben did note that, “For better or for worse, Lev makes sort of interesting, weird things happen.” This is apparent in the film itself, which traces Parnas’ strange and often funny life as as a Russian immigrant who found himself deeply embroiled in a presidential scandal. Producer Alfred Spellman, who runs the company Rakontur with Corben, has previously described Parnas as having a “Forrest Gumpian presence for a multitude of Trumpworld shakedowns and swindles.”

The film also documents how Parnas experienced a shift in his ideology and decided to speak out – starting with a groundbreaking interview with Maddow in January 2020. Parnas revealed that at the time, he had narrowed down his choice for the interview to two people – Maddow and CNN's Anderson Cooper. He called his wife to tell her and, according to Parnas, “She said, ‘That's no choice – of course it's Rachel.’”

Parnas acknowledged the irony, as he had considered Maddow “enemy number one” up until that point due to her unwavering coverage. But he also admitted, “There’s a lot of reporters, a lot of people who have covered the Trump era. But there’s nobody quite like Rachel Maddow.”

Maddow understood that Parnas was taking a significant risk. “One of the things that often gets overlooked about that interview with Lev is that it was a very risky move for him, considering he was facing criminal charges at the time,” she explained. “When you’re facing charges, it’s not a good time to do an interview.” In the interview, Maddow was struck not only by Parnas's candor and honesty but also by the sheer volume of secret recordings he possessed. So when the idea for a film about Parnas was presented, she said, “I knew we needed someone with extraordinary storytelling ability, someone who could really understand complex information, to be able to take the massive amount of data Lev had on his phone and turn it into a compelling and verifiable narrative.”

It was Corben who first reached out to Parnas, shortly after that interview. The filmmaker had slid into Parnas’ DMs on X/Twitter and it turned out the latter was a fan of the Corben’s previous works, including “Cocaine Cowboys.” Maddow also felt Corben and Spellman were the perfect pair due to their history of “in telling very, very serious stories in the funniest way possible.” She noted, “I really believe that the best way to tell this story is to not leave the absurdity out, to not shy away from how freaking hilarious and ridiculous, while at the same time, it is super serious and terrible, and it has really, really deep, serious implications for national security and for a lot of people’s lives.”

While the film does have a lot of absurd humor and high stakes, there is also a persistent theme of forgiveness. Said Maddow, “There’s been impunity for so many wrongdoers and the individual human beings who have been so harshly judged, whether it’s Andrew McCabe at the FBI or Peter Struck or Stormy Daniels or Lev and Igor, or Hunter Biden – the individual human beings who have borne the cost of this era have borne it on behalf of our country. And part of defending our country means standing up for them.”

She added, “That does not mean they’re perfect individuals and does not mean they have not been involved in some questionable activities. But remorse is genuine. The truth is the truth. And when people are singled out and scrutinized for political reasons and for the advancement of this movement that’s trying to overturn our system of government, one of the things that we can do is not just sit back and passively observe the unfolding events, but recognize that there are real Americans right now who have had their lives upended as an example to all of us and to frighten all of us, and we can stand up for those people.”