Details
In December 2021, Russia's Supreme Court ordered the liquidation of Memorial, the country's oldest human rights organisation, founded in 1987 to document and expose Stalinist terror. Ten months later, Memorial was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Taisiya Krugovykh and Vasily Bogatov filmed the process from the inside. We see the court hearings and repression against the supporters of Memorial, the evacuation of the organisation’s archive before its Moscow office is seized, and the trial of its co-chair Oleg Orlov on charges of “discrediting the Russian Armed Forces,” which ends with his imprisonment.
Shot in the tradition of direct cinema, without commentary or voiceover, the film traces the dismantling of Russian civil society through the people who lived it. Both filmmakers have been in exile in France since 2022.
This screening is presented by Pushkin House and followed by a Q&A with Irina Scherbakova, co-founder of Memorial.
Irina Scherbakova is a historian and a founding member of Memorial. She worked as a translator of German literature and as a journalist, and in the late 1970s began recording the testimony of former Gulag prisoners. In the 1990s and 2000s she taught oral history at the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow, and she has been a visiting professor at the universities of Salzburg, Bremen and Jena. At Memorial she led the youth and education programmes and coordinated oral history projects. Her awards include the German Federal Cross of Merit (2005), the Carl von Ossietzky Prize for Contemporary History and Politics (2014) and the Goethe Medal (2017). She has lived in exile in Germany since 2022.
Screening times and booking
Please note: There are only 5 mins of trailers before our screenings.
Prices
Adult: £12.5
Senior: £10
Student: £10
Please note: There are only 5 mins of trailers before our screenings.
Prices
Adult: £12.5
Senior: £10
Student: £10
