The Pushkin Club invites you to join us on the evening of 13 December for the British premiere of The Dmitriev Affair (2023) – a new documentary by Jessica Gorter telling the story of historian Yuri Dmitriev who uncovered and documented mass graves in his home region of Karelia, containing the bodies of thousands of people secretly executed during Stalin’s 1936–1938 Great Purge. The screening will be followed by the Q&A with the director.
Deep in the Russian forests, sixty-year-old Yuri Dmitriev is searching for mass graves from the era of Stalin’s terror against his own people, against the wishes of the authorities. After many years of searching, he finds a mass grave in the pine forests of Karelia, in northwest Russia, which contains thousands of people who were secretly executed during Stalin’s Great Terror. Rather than the Russian government, it is Dmitriev who tirelessly tracks down their identities in the archives and organises commemorations for their next of kin. Thanks to his efforts, at last they know what happened to their lost relatives. While abroad there is increasing recognition of this ‘archaeologist of terror’, Dmitriev is discredited in Russia as someone who is in league with the West. With tragic precision, Dmitriev predicts his own future and that of his country.
Read a recent interview with Jessica Gorter here.
In November The Dmitriev Affair was awarded Best Human Rights Film at Verzio International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival in Budapest.
The Dmitriev Affair
Director: Jessica Gorter
Duration: 98 minutes
Producer: Frank van den Engel, Elize Kerseboom (line producer), Oksana Maksimchuk (segment producer, Russia)
Cinematographer: Sander Snoep, Sergei Markelov, Alexandra Ivanova, Jessica Gorter
Editor: Katharina Wartena
Language: Russian with English subtitles
Country: The Netherlands
Year: 2023
about the director
Jessica Gorter studied documentary directing and editing at the Dutch Film and Television Academy in Amsterdam. In her youth, she lived in the United States for a few years, and after her studies she spent a considerable amount of time in Russia. Her experience of these different worlds, fuelled by her passion for photography, has formed an important basis for her subsequent work. Gorter made her international breakthrough with 900 Days (2011), about the myth and reality of the Leningrad blockade. Her latest documentary follows on from the films she has been making in Russia since the 1990s, in which she looks at how the collapse of the Soviet Union affects people’s lives.