The Dmitriev Affair (Jessica Gorter)
Russia & Ukraine
•
1h 35m
Directed by Jessica Gorter • Documentary • 2024 • 96 minutes
Yuri Dmitriev exhumes what the Russian rulers would rather forget. After years of searching the pine forests of Karelia in northwestern Russia, he discovers a mass grave containing thousands of people who were secretly executed during Stalin’s “Great Terror” of 1937.
It is not the Russian government but Yuri Dmitriev who tracks down their identities in the archives and organizes commemorations for their next of kin. Thanks to his efforts, they finally find out what happened to their lost relatives. Having himself been left at a maternity clinic as a baby, he is a man on a mission: ‘Every human being has the right to know where they came from and where their family lies buried.’
While abroad there is increasing recognition for this “archaeologist of terror”, in Russia Dmitriev is discredited as someone collaborating with the West. Then he is arrested, on basis of a fabricated charge. Tragically accurate Dmitriev predicts his own future and that of his country.
Up Next in Russia & Ukraine
-
Eastern Front
Directed by Vitaly Mansky and Yevhen Titarenko • Documentary • 2023 • 98 minutes
On February 24, 2022, Yevhen Titarenko didn’t have to puzzle over what he should do. He went to the front. And from the first minute of Russia’s large-scale aggression against Ukraine, he began to record everything ...
-
Gorbachev. Heaven
Directed by Vitaly Mansky • Documentary • 2021 • 100 minutes
GORBACHEV. HEAVEN finds acclaimed director Vitaly Mansky (UNDER THE SUN) at home with a man who helped to shape the 20th-century: Mikhail Gorbachev.
The Soviet leader was acclaimed as the architect of Glasnost and Perestroika, polici...
-
How Putin Came to Power
Directed by Tania Rakhmanova • Documentary • 2005 • 52 minutes
In August 1999, Vladimir V. Putin, head of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), successor to the KGB, was appointed Prime Minister. On December 31st of that year, Boris Yeltsin announced that Putin would succeed him as President ...
