Please join the Russia and Eurasia Program at The Fletcher School for a film screening and conversation with documentary filmmaker Jessica Gorter, director of The Dmitriev Affair (2023). The event is supported by the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University.

Deep inside the Russian forests, against the wishes of the authorities, 60-year-old Yuri Dmitriev searches for mass graves from the era of Stalin’s terror against his own people—until one day he is arrested and sentenced to 15 years in a penal colony. Following him closely, the film paints a shocking picture of the way the Russian state rewrites history and treats its citizens.

Dmitriev exhumes what the Russian rulers would rather forget. After years of searching the pine forests of Karelia in northwestern Russia, he discovers a mass grave containing thousands of people who were secretly executed during Stalin’s “Great Terror” of 1937. It is not the Russian government but Dmitriev who tracks down their identities in the archives and organizes commemorations for their next of kin. Thanks to his efforts, they finally find out what happened to their lost relatives. Having himself been left at a maternity clinic as a baby, he is a man on a mission: “Every human being has the right to know where they came from and where their family lies buried.”

While abroad there is increasing recognition for this “archaeologist of terror”, in Russia Dmitriev is discredited as someone collaborating with the West. Then he is arrested based on a fabricated charge. Tragically accurate Dmitriev predicts his own future and that of his country.

The event is open to the public. Please make sure to register via Eventbrite to attend the event in person. Refreshments will be served.

Jessica Gorter is a Dutch documentary filmmaker. She studied directing and editing at the Dutch Film and Television Academy in Amsterdam. Her films revolve around the tension between personal memories and history at large. They are acclaimed for never being unequivocal and characterized by her visual and observing style. Her films are screened worldwide at film festivals, theatrically released, and broadcast internationally. Gorter made her breakthrough with 900 Days (2011) about the myth and reality of the Leningrad blockade. Earlier in her career, she made the short poetic documentary Ferryman across the Volga (1997) and Piter (2004), a captivating look into the lives of seven residents of Saint Petersburg at a turning point in history. In The Red Soul (2017), she investigated why Stalin is still seen as a hero by so many Russians. Her latest documentary, The Dmitriev Affair (2023), is a thematic continuation of all the films she has made in Russia since the 1990s, laying bare the consequences for individual lives of the disintegration of the Soviet Union.