{"id":152983,"date":"2025-09-22T11:14:09","date_gmt":"2025-09-22T11:14:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/152983\/"},"modified":"2025-09-22T11:14:09","modified_gmt":"2025-09-22T11:14:09","slug":"at-russias-intervision-song-contest-a-vietnamese-singer-gets-top-prize","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/152983\/","title":{"rendered":"At Russia’s Intervision Song Contest, A Vietnamese Singer Gets Top Prize"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Vietnamese pop singer won top honors at Russia\u2019 s Intervision Song Contest, a Cold-War era music festival that Moscow revived in response to being kicked out of the global Eurovision spectacle for its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.<\/p>\n

Duc Phuc, who has nearly 2 million followers on Instagram, sang a dance-beat pop song based on a folktale about an ancient king repelling an invading army to take first prize in September 20 in Moscow.<\/p>\n

A total of 22 performers and groups from countries across the world, including Belarus, Brazil, India, and China, sent contestants to the event, competing for a 30-million-ruble prize. ($360,000).<\/p>\n

Among the contestants originally slated to participate was a US-born R&B singer named Brandon Howard, though he dropped out last week citing family reasons.<\/p>\n

Howard\u2019s place as the US entrant was then taken by Vassy, an Australian-born singer who also has a US passport.<\/p>\n

But she then dropped out at the last minute due to \u201cunprecedented political pressure from the government of Australia,\u201d Intervision\u2019s organizers said<\/a> in a statement.<\/p>\n

The original Intervision was first organized in Czechoslovakia in 1965<\/a>, and grew to become the socialist alternative to Eurovision, which had been founded a decade earlier.<\/p>\n

While it never rivaled the other contest\u2019s popularity, Intervision carried political weight, projecting the supposed solidarity of the Warsaw Pact.<\/p>\n

When Austrian drag queen Conchita Wurst won Eurovision in 2014, Russian authorities announced plans to revive the competition as “an alternative to bearded Eurovision” but nothing came of it.<\/p>\n

After its all-out invasion of Ukraine, Moscow was banned from Eurovision, along with other major global sporting and cultural events.<\/p>\n

In February, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered<\/a> the return of Intervision.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Vietnamese pop singer won top honors at Russia\u2019 s Intervision Song Contest, a Cold-War era music festival…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":152984,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[96,50,154,12361,391,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-152983","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-entertainment","tag-news","tag-russia","tag-the-rundown-stories","tag-tv","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152983","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=152983"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152983\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/152984"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=152983"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=152983"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=152983"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}