The riveting story of Yuri Dmitriev is a tale of one man’s fight against the erasure of history by the Russian state. Deep inside the Russian forests, against the wishes of the authorities, 60-year-old Yuri Dmitriev searches for mass graves from the era of Stalin’s terror against his own people – until one day he is arrested and sentenced to 15 years in a penal colony. The film paints a shocking picture of the way the Russian state rewrites history and treats its citizens.

Virtually every family in Soviet Union was affected by Stalin’s terror, yet no one has ever been convicted for the crimes committed under his rule. Is Stalin a hero who led the Soviet Union to victory? Or is he a mass murderer who made millions of victims among his own population? To this day, the inhabitants of Russia are deeply divided about how to deal with the painful memories from this past. A documentary by Jessica Gorter about the psychological legacy of the Soviet Union and how it has lodged itself in the Russian mind.

The siege of Leningrad lasted 900 days during World War II. Those who were lucky enough to survive these terrible days had a long life, in which the inhuman horror that the protagonists had to endure echoed.