Events

A Bitter Taste of Freedom

An Evening with Marina Goldovskaya

When:
Friday, March 9, 2012, 7:00pm - 7:00pm
Description:

Curated and introduced by Artemis Willis, Ph.D candidate, Department of Cinema & Media Studies.

Russian documentary filmmaker Marina Goldovskaya presents this soulful homage to her close friend Anna Politkovskaya, the fearless investigative reporter, who was murdered on her doorstep by an unknown assailant in 2006, presumably for her outspoken criticism of the government-sanctioned war in Chechnya.  Recipient of an Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism, A Bitter Taste of Freedom evades the conventions of reportage, instead weaving contextual archive and in-the-field photos with diaristic footage the filmmaker shot in Politkovskaya’s home during their many years of intimate conversations, beginning with Goldovskaya’s first portrait of Politkovskaya, A Taste of Freedom (1991).

Marina Goldovskaya’s work, which includes the award-winning films Solovky Power (1987), The House on Arbat Street  (1993) and The Prince is Back (1999), has garnered international acclaim since the late 1980s.  As an eyewitness to a half-century of Russia’s turbulent history, which she has spent the past 40 years meticulously archiving on celluloid and digital video, Goldovskaya was the first Russian filmmaker to introduce a personal diary style in the documentary genre.  She used this style in The Shattered Mirror (1992), which chronicled the emotions of Russians living through the turmoil of perestroika culminating in the putsch of October 1993.  Currently head of the documentary program at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film, and Television, Goldovskaya received a Ph.D. in Fine Arts in the Moscow State Film Institute in 1987, taught documentary in Moscow State University from 1966 to 1995, and wrote numerous articles and six books on documentary filmmaking. Her memoir, Woman with a Movie Camera, was published by U Texas Press in 2006.

(Marina Goldovskaya, Sweden/US, 2011, Blu-Ray, Russian with English subtitles, 88 min)

Sponsored by the Film Studies Center Graduate Student Curatorial Program and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.