Deep in the Russian forests, the 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 North-West Russia, which contains thousands of people who were secretly executed during Stalin’s ‘Great Terror’ of 1937. 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.

After the film, director Jessica Gorter will enter into discussion with Russianist and Assistant Professor in Cyber-Security and Politics Mariëlle Wijermars.

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 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.)

In collaboration with Lumière Cinema.