Turya - the Land of Polissya

Documentary about the director of the Pereyaslav-Khmelnytskyi Historical and Cultural Reserve (Kyiv region), M. Sikorsky. Dr. Drektor speaks at a meeting and gives an interview. Employees of the reserve tell about M. Sikorsky. The Pereiaslav-Khmelnytskyi Museum of Folk Architecture and Life is shown.

The Soviet authorities tried in every possible way to hide the truth about the shootings in Babyn Yar, because the victims there were mostly Jews. In 1966, on the eve of the 25th anniversary of the shootings, for the first time a small group of Kyivans, together with the famous writer Viktor Nekrasov, gathered near Babyn Yar to honor the memory of the victims. Employees of the Kyiv Documentary Film Studio found out about it: cameraman Eduard Timlin and director Rafail Nakhmanovych. Under the guise of shooting a film about the Soviet police, they decided to record this event on tape.

The film tells the stories of Crimean Tatars who returned to their homeland half a century after their forced deportation by Stalin’s regime on 18 May 1944. At the heart of the film is an interview with Besibe Aksakova, an activist in the Crimean Tatar movement. She shares her own experience of exile and reflects on how, in her life story, the statuses of “war heroine” and “enemy of the people” were paradoxically combined.

The film is a reflection on the difficult fate in the Soviet state of V. Nekrasov, a world-famous writer, an honest and principled man.