The Dmitriev Affair

The Netherlands, 2023 (96 min.) 

Yuri 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 Yuri Dmitriev who tracks down their identities in the archives and organizes commemorations for their next of kin, who finally find out what happened to their lost relatives.  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, on basis of a fabricated charge. 

“Gulag historian’s persecution is a microcosm of Putin’s Russia.”
— Moscow Times

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Jessica Gorter’s two previous documentaries (900 Days, on the memory of the siege of Leningrad, and The Red Soul, on the memory of Stalin) were shown at the ASN Convention (2012, 2018).