Director Manuela Morar, producer of the documentary "Materik. The uncomfortable position in which we pray," starring Basil Kovaliov - the last survivor with Bessarabian origins of the severe regime concentration camp in Kolyma - confesses that the film was burdensome, because of the reluctance of the interlocutors.
The documentary talks about how, at the end of the Second World War, numerous Romanians from Bessarabia were arrested by the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), sentenced to years in camps in severe conditions and sent beyond the Arctic Circle to Kolyma gold mines. When released, many of the former prisoners could not return home. "Wolf ticket" - the visa on everyone's passport - forbade them to return to the country of origin or to live less than 100 km from the big cities.
"It was very hard to make people talk to us, to accept us. But we made it," said Morar on Thursday evening, after the preview screening of the documentary at the Romanian Cultural Institute (ICR) headquarters.
She revealed that the film is the result of prospects for achieving a larger project, "Wolf ticket", which involved shooting in the period 2012-2016 in Siberia and the Republic of Moldova, an attempt that should be completed by autumn.
Kovaliov or K437, now octogenarian, spent 67 years in Kolyma and has five unsuccessful attempts to escape, living alone in his studio in Magadan, the port town built by prisoners on the beachfront of Ohotsk Sea. During detention, he served in the Resistance Movement ongoing in the camps and led by former officers of ROA (the Russian Liberation Army), who fought for the release of prisoners and the establishment of a new separate state, the Northern Republic. He is one of the founders of the anti-Soviet organization DPR (the Democratic Party).
The film, to be presented at the second edition of the Excellence Awards Gala for Romanians in Historical communities, on Monday, 30 January, was accomplished with the support of Mandragora Film Production House, ICR, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Romanian Television, of the Flag Association, the "PRO-MEMORIA 1940-1945" National Federation.
The event at ICR, which brought together some of the film's team members, occasioned the presentation of a micro-exhibition of photographs taken during the four years of prospects and shooting in Siberia and the Republic of Moldova, a foray into the life of the inhabitants of the former areas of the Far East Russian camp.
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