Iurii Alekseievich Dmitriev, *1956, a local historian and activist, a leading member of the Memorial Society in Karelia, is known for his work locating execution sites of Stalin's Great Terror to identify the buried victims and list all the names in Karelian Books of Remembrance.

In 2016, to discredit the historian and his work, Dmitriev was arrested on charges of child pornography. After several years of arrests, trials, repeated criminal investigations, and appeals, Dmitreiev was imprisoned again in 2021, and his sentence was increased to 15 years.

Short synopsis

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. 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, on basis of a fabricated charge. Tragically accurate Dmitriev predicts his own future and that of his country.

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Jessica Gorter is a Dutch documentary filmmaker and the receiver of multiple international awards in documentary film. Her films revolve around the tension between personal memories and history at large. Gorter made her breakthrough with 900 Days (2011) about the myth and reality of the Leningrad blockade. Other projects include Ferryman across the Volga (1997, Prix de RTBF) and Piter (IFFR, 2004): a look into the lives of seven residents of Saint Petersburg at a turning point in history. In her third feature-length film, The Red Soul (2017), the director 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 '90s, laying bare the consequences for individual lives of the disintegration of the Soviet Union.