Elena Yakovich

Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov lived under six rulers of the Soviet state. He met with five of them - Beria (read Stalin), Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov and Gorbachev - personally and hoped that one way or another he would be able to influence their decisions. But he had a real impact on the society of his country. He was born under Lenin and died under Gorbachev, a year and a half before the day when the state collapsed, which he helped strengthen in the first half of his life and fought against in the second. This "turn", as he himself called it, is the most interesting thing in Sakharov's history.

This film is the story of a man’s lifelong search for authentic Yiddish folk music and of his unique archive, which was presumed to be lost forever. Moyshe Beregovsky, a musician and scholar, crisscrossed Ukraine with phonograph in hand during the most dramatic years of Soviet history in order to record and study the traditional music of Ukrainian Jewry. His work began in the 1920’s and led to his arrest and imprisonment in a Stalinist labor camp in 1950. Most of those he recorded on hundreds of fragile wax cylinders were shot by the Nazis and tossed into countless mass graves. Ultimately, Beregovsky succeeded in saving the musical heritage of the centuries-old Yiddish civilization. He rescued the Living Voice of his people from the flames of the Holocaust but paid for it with his life. With this introduction, Yelena Yakovich one of the leading Russian documentary film-makers, begins her latest work, Song Searcher.

Dmitri Shostakovich called her the "Queen of Russian Poetry". She remained a queen in the memory of those who knew her, a queen who survived great glory and the bitterness of humiliation, trampled down by the authorities and retaining her dignity. She lived a long life. The star of the Silver Age, she died on March 5, 1966 by a whim of fate on the day of Stalin's death.

The film is dedicated to the centenary of Alexander Galich. One of the great trinity of bards Galich - Okudzhava - Vysotsky, who for decades determined the social and intellectual climate of the country. The authors of the film tried to understand how it happened that he, a recognized playwright and screenwriter, challenged the authorities and chose the fate of a disgraced bard, an idol of informal culture, went his way from well-being to rejection, to unofficial glory? He was forced to leave the USSR, three years later he died tragically in Paris, and his songs keep coming back and coming back to us.

This film is about the life and fate of one of the most significant writers of the twentieth century. Grossman's novel "Life and Fate" was arrested on February 14, 1961, three years after the massacre of Pasternak's "Doctor Zhivago" and a year and a half before the publication of Solzhenitsyn's "One Day of Ivan Denisovich" in Novy Mir. Grossman died shortly after Roman's arrest. His fate was taken away from him, but "the manuscript did not burn." Although I could. The film shows for the first time the documents from the "Special Folder" of Vasily Grossman, kept all these years under the stamp "Top Secret", as well as exclusive filming of the transfer of the arrested manuscript "Life and Destiny" from the archives of the FSB in TsGALI.

The cycle is dedicated to the Spanish Civil War, its very special role in the intellectual and cultural history of the XX century. The heroes of the cycle: Hemingway, Saint-Exupery, Malraux, Ehrenburg - participants in this war and its chroniclers.