Date: 10.01.2020
A Meeting with Director Marianna Yarovskaya of the Film Women of the Gulag was held at RSAL
On April 29, 2019, in RSAL, the well-known documentary filmmaker Marianna Yarovskaya presented the documentary Women of the Gulag, which was shortlisted for the 2018 Academy Award in the Best Documentary Film category. This is only the second time in the 90-year history of the Oscars that a female director from Russia has been so close to the prestigious award.
The 50-minute film tells the story of six women who survived the Gulag, the last witnesses to the repressions of the 1930s. The film took five years to shoot; the team found its heroines in different, remote corners of the former Soviet Union—in the Urals, the Far East, Abkhazia, and the Moscow suburbs. At present, only three of the film’s six heroines are still alive.
In her speech, Marianna Yarovskaya spoke of the film as a document of the era, the desire to capture living witnesses, to tell their stories for a subsequent ‘global reinvention.’ The film’s audience gave the film and its film maker a standing ovation.
