On this occasion, photography taken by Marius Vlad, Veaceslav Cebotari, Ionuț Pițurescu and Mihai Țucă over four years of prospections and shootings in Siberia and the Republic of Moldova, an incursion in the life of the inhabitants of the former detention camps of the Russian Far East, will be exhibited.
At the end of the Second World War, numerous Bessarabia Romanians were taken into custody by NKVD, condemned to years of detention camp in severe conditions and sent beyond the Polar Circle to the gold mines in Kolyma. Upon release, many of the former inmates were not able to return home. The „Wolf Ticket " – the visa stamped in their passports – forbid them to go back to their country of origin or to live within less than 100 km of big cities.
The photo depict contemporary Kolyma, as it is today: a very little explored frozen world, at the end of the Earth, where all the people deported – either Russians, Ukrainians, Tartars, Germans, Polish, Latvians and Bessarabians - they all had to create a new
home and a new identity thousands of miles away from Materik – as is called in the local jargon of Kolyma the world where this people (or their ancestors) were born and where they grew up.
Materik (translation into Romanian – natal land, duration - 50 min), is a
cine-verite with elements of
travelogue, presenting Vasile Kovaliov, a Bessarabian guide survivor of the Kolyma severe detention camps, who came back home on his natal land (
materik), after 64 years of prison and exile in the Russian Far East. The documentary was shot in the summer of, in Odessa, Ukraine, when Kovaliov (now de 87 years old), accompanied by three members of the shooting crew, travelled over 12,000 kilometres to visit his home place and the few people still alive. The re-encounter takes place in the context of the political tensions around the Kiev Revolution and in the wake of an imminent war, five months after Crimea was annexed by the Russian Federation.
Public access to the event is free of charge within
