I didn’t plan to go to any movies this week, but once again, that one was impossible to skip, so I ended up making time.
The film is based on a novel by Georgiy Demidov and tells the story of a recent law school graduate who learns about torture in Stalin’s prisons, and, believing that this is a plot against the Soviet state, tries to bring the case to the General Prosecutor, only to be arrested for this attempt (more details here). I didn’t do any research on the film before watching it, so I didn’t know who Georgiy Demidov was, which is why I was a little bit puzzled about the “target audience.” The movie is impeccably produced, the cinematography is brilliant, and no matter how much you know about the topic, you can’t take your eyes away from the screen. The story itself, however, was one of the thousands I’ve heard, so I wondered what was a reason yet another movie on this well explored and recently unpopular subject was produced.
Since the name Georgiy Demidov didn’t ring a bell for me, I looked him up. What I learned about him explained a lot, and everything started to make sense. He was one of these writers, who started to write after he became a prisoner of the Stalin’s regime, similar to Varlam Shalamov (with whom they were friends for some time). Then I realized that the movie is a time capsule projecting the view on what happened 90 years ago not from our current perspective, but from the perspective of people who were there at that time.
It doesn’t look like it’s easy to find books by Georgiy Demidov, but I keep looking.
Hettie's Reflections 