The Poste-restante Diary

The Embassy of the Republic of Latvia in London and the UCL SSEES present the UK Premiere of The Poste-restante Diary, a documentary by the contemporary Russian film-director Grigorii Amnuel′ that based on a diary kept by a Latvian national, Artūr Stradiņš (1907-1986), after his arrest in June 1941 by Soviet security forces as an ‘enemy of the people’ and deportation to a prison camp near Viatka.

The director is travelling to London to be present at the screening and to answer questions from the audience after the screening. The event will also include a brief welcome from Andris Teikmanis, the Latvian Ambassador to Great Britain. Admission is free, and tickets will be issued at the box-office on the day of the screening.

ABOUT THE FILM

Dienasgrāmata pēc pieprasījuma (The Poste-restante Diary, 2015) is a documentary by the contemporary Russian film-director Grigorii Amnuel′. The film is based on a diary kept by a Latvian national, Artūr Stradiņš (1907-1986), after his arrest in June 1941 by Soviet security forces as an ‘enemy of the people’ and deportation to a prison camp near Viatka, a city located in the Western Urals which at the time was known as Kirov, where he served a sentence of ten years hard labour (this sentence was followed by a period of internal exile in Siberia, and he was not allowed to return to Latvia until 1968). The diary was written on tobacco paper issued to smokers at the camp as part of their daily rations and is regarded by historians as an extremely rare, unmediated record of life within the Soviet GULAG system. The illustrations which feature as part of the documentary are the work of another former GULAG prisoner, Yulo Sooster, an Estonian citizen who spent seven years in a labour camp (1949-1956), and Danzig Balaiev, a citizen of the Buriat Soviet Republic who spent the years 1938 to 1940 in an orphanage for children whose parents had been arrested as ‘enemies of the people’. The film soundtrack features String Quartet no. 3 by the celebrated Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki, members of whose family perished in Katyń forest at the hands of the Soviet NKVD in April 1943.

Grigorii Amnuel′ is an award-winning director and cultural figure who has been involved in many international initiatives and collaborations during the last twenty-five years in the spheres of film, theatre, and music. Among the numerous festivals which he has organized is ‘Masterpieces of European Cinema Unknown in the USSR’, which screened one hundred feature-length films from different nations which fell victim to censorship during the Soviet era.