“The Dmitriev Affair” deftly conveys the context in which Dmitriev’s trials took place - from Russia’s glorification of the Soviet past to its narrative that rights activists are working on the orders of the West to discredit and destabilize Russia from inside. “Yury was very concerned with her upbringing and well-being.” “They seemed to have a genuine and gentle relationship,” Gorter said of Dmitriev’s bond with his adopted daughter. On the day of his acquittal in 2018, all contact between Dmitriev and Natasha - who had been sent to live with her biological grandmother after his 2016 arrest - was cut off. In 2020 he was sentenced to 13 years in prison, a term later extended to 15 years. While he was acquitted of those charges in 2018, he was soon charged with sexually abusing his daughter. Dmitriev - and, later, court-appointed investigators - said the photos were taken to monitor the health of a sickly child. Just months after Gorter traveled to Karelia to film him in 2016, Dmitriev was accused of child pornography after investigators found nude photos of 11-year-old Natasha. “As soon as you connect to contemporary Russia, then there’s a problem.” “For the past 10 years, you could speak about the victims, no problem,” Gorter said. It was only a matter of time before Dmitriev’s work struck a nerve. “The people aim to remember every single one.” “Our state aims to wipe out the individual as if he never existed,” he says at a later point. “Humans should be allowed to know their heritage and where their family members are buried,” Dmitriev says in the film. Interspersed with archival footage from the Stalin era and the 1990s, the film also depicts the sorrow and catharsis felt by the victims’ families as they learned where their missing relatives had gone. Little music is used apart from ominous drums and horns at various intervals. The 96-minute documentary shows Dmitriev’s journey through interviews shot at his home and over Skype as well as voiceovers of his letters from prison. One thing I knew for certain - Yury’s story must be told.” “When I started on this film, I had no idea where it would take me. “What I saw most in him was the recognition that something happened and his readiness to speak out,” Gorter said. Gorter met Dmitriev while working on her 2017 documentary “The Red Soul,” which explores the reckonings that ordinary Russians have had with the brutal past of the Soviet Union. “He gave them back their names, and established that they were killed.” “Officially, these people ‘didn’t exist’,” Gorter told The Moscow Times. “The Dmitriev Affair,” award-winning Dutch documentary filmmaker Jessica Gorter’s latest film that premiered last week to a full house in Amsterdam, chronicles the events leading up to Dmitriev’s imprisonment - and illustrates how Russia’s system of repression can tear lives and families apart.ĭmitriev, 67, played a key role in uncovering a set of Stalin-era mass graves in the forests of Finland-bordering Karelia in the glasnost period of the late 1980s.Īs regional head of the human rights organization Memorial, Dmitriev spent the next decade digging through the KGB archives to identify thousands of victims of Stalin’s Great Terror in the mass graves at Sandarmokh and Krasny Bor. Minutes later, the viewer is thrust into the cold, clinical Russian criminal justice system alongside Dmitriev himself.Įscorted up a winding staircase by law enforcement officers, this Dmitriev is physically diminished: hair close-shaven, wrists bound by handcuffs, body hunched over. AMSTERDAM - In the opening shots of “The Dmitriev Affair,” the viewer walks alongside Yury Dmitriev, the gulag historian who uncovered and documented Stalin-era mass graves in his home region, the northern republic of Karelia.ĭressed in camouflage, with long, white hair and goatee framing his angular face, Dmitriyev silently treads through the mossy taiga forest like a specter, searching for traces of more graves with his young adopted daughter, Natasha.
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