The seed for the documentary The Dmitriev Affair was sown in May 2016, when I travelled to the Russian republic of Karelia to film Yuri Dmitriev as one of the seven protagonists of my film The Red Soul (2017). I was impressed with his work – searching for Stalin-era mass graves and retrieving the identities of those buried there. To date, Yuri has found the names of over 30,000 people who were executed and whose fate remained a mystery to their families for over 70 years. I also became fascinated by his single-mindedness and his charismatic personality.

When we said goodbye, Yuri told me he had the feeling the intelligence services were following him, but he hoped we would meet again anyway. He was rather matter-of-fact about it. ‘If they want to charge me, they will already have the case well-prepared,’ he said with a shrug. ‘In the meantime, I will just continue my work.’ Six months later he was arrested.

Two weeks after Yuri’s arrest in late 2016, there was a detailed news item on Russian national television. Watching it in the Netherlands, I was dismayed to see him portrayed as a criminal harming the country and the people, when in my view he should have been hailed on TV as someone helping the country and the people come to grips with the horrors of the Soviet past.

My films tend to explore the friction between history in its official version and the personal memories which are often very different. World history, in the end, is always about ordinary, real people. I want to understand the reasons why personal stories are so easily subordinated to the interests of a political goal, when it is precisely those small personal stories we need to gain a better understanding of each other and the world around us.

When I started on this film, I had no idea where it would take me. One thing I knew for certain – Yuri’s story must be told. In him, I recognized my own desire to bring to light what is being obscured, to fathom it and to record it to make sure it will not be lost.

It turned into a film I could never have imagined. Before my very eyes – and my camera lens – I saw the phenomenon known as “rewriting history” unfold: a citizen exposing a hidden part of history is himself erased from historiography.

Looking back at the past five years, I can conclude that Yuri’s life and fate are closely linked to the zeitgeist and developments in Russia over the past twenty years. I ended up making a film not just about Yuri and his work, but also about the mechanism of distorting and abusing the notion of “truth” by an institution only interested in self-preservation.

As I see it, each person, people or nation needs an honest depiction of the past in order to come to terms with past trauma. The Dmitriev Affair shows what denying occurrences and suppressing memories does to people. By doing so, it tells a bigger story about what is happening in Russia today.

Jessica Gorter, Amsterdam, April 2023