Join us for an evening with filmmaker Marianna Yarovskaya director of ground breaking documentary film Women of the Gulag, that tells the compelling and tragic stories of the female last survivors of the Gulag, the brutal system of repression and terror that devastated the Soviet population under Stalin. In conversation with Lucy Ash.
This is the first documentary film to have been made about these women and their experience of the camps. Filmmaker Marianna Yarovskaya has filmed the women who survived Stalin's repressions of the 1930s and imprisonment in the camps.
Yarovskaya will talk about the making of the film, how she found the women and interacted with them. She will also show outtakes of the film, and go into some of the stories that didn't make it into the film. The legacy of the Gulag remains in dispute in Russia - Yarovskaya makes a valuable and objective contribution to this discussion by going back to primary sources in her film.
Marianna Yarovskaya’s Undesirables won a Student Academy Award in 2001. Since then, she has worked for dozens of programs for Discovery Channel, National Geographic, History Channel, Greenpeace, Animal Planet as producer and senior editor. She also worked on two Academy Award-winning features and one Academy nominated film as a researcher, and directed an award winning film, Holy Warriors. Producers Guild of America (PGA) member. Yarovskaya is the second Russian female director to be shortlisted for an Academy Award in any category in 91 years. If the film wins, it will be the second Russian-directed documentary in the history of Oscars: one other Russian documentary film actually won an Academy Award – in 1943, a film about WWII.
Women of the Gulag, first female director from Russian Federation shortlisted for the Oscars.
Lucy Ash is an awarding-winning broadcast journalist with more than 20 years’ experience as a BBC correspondent, presenter and senior producer. Her most recent work includes: Ukraine's Frontline Bakery (Radio 4, World Service and BBC World TV) a rdio documentary and film about a new bakery in the town of Marinka, Eastern Ukraine, which is bringing some comfort and sustenance to the local people amidst the trauma of war; The Red and the White (BBC World Service, BBC Russian) a three part radio series on the Allied Intervention in North Russia at the end of WWI; Russia's Exit Dilemma (Radio 3, World Service) in which Ash meets emigres, exiles and staunch remainers in London and Berlin, Moscow and St Petersburg to weigh up the prospects for the young and ambitious in today's Russia. Other works by Lucy Ash includes Putin's Park, Rebooting Rural Russia and Extreme Selfies - Russian Style, amongst many others. Ash's freelance work outside of the BBC, includes the Guardian, The Times, and The Daily Telegraph. A half hour film When the West Invaded Russia, by Lucy Ash is due to be broadcast in March 2018.