The Crimean Wall of Distrust & Fear: An Interview With Filmmaker Aniela Astrid Gabryel
‘After the annexation of Crimea by Russia, the Tatars became victims of political repression. The peninsula, where Ukrainians, Russians, Tatars, Greeks and Cypriots once lived side by side, is now leaving all those who can no longer feel at home there,’ says Aniela Astrid Gabryel, director of the documentary film ‘When Will This Wind Stop’.
Bartosz Staszczyszyn: Why did you make a film about the Crimean Tatars?
Aniela Astrid Gabryel: Their situation today is tragic. On the one hand, it reminds us of the burning problems of contemporary Europe; on the other hand, it also raises the ghosts of the past. The Crimean Tatars, murdered and deported many years ago, are once more living under a repressive regime and, against their will, they are becoming refugees.
I’ve long been interested in the philosophy of Family Constellations put forth by Bert Hellinger that suggests that the experience of our ancestors can have an impact on our lives, that we are part of a larger whole. The history of the Crimean Tatars who are once again becoming victims of Russian repression is therefore even closer to me.
BS: How did your work on the film begin?
AAG: In April of 2014, a few weeks after the annexation of Crimea by Russia, I travelled to attend some film workshops in Kyiv. I had already read about the situation of the Crimean Tatars and I wanted to meet those who had been forcibly displaced from their family homes and who had fled deeper into Ukraine.
In Kyiv, I met Oleksandr Pozdnyakov, a Ukrainian cameraman studying at the Łódź Film School, and Taras Dron, a Ukrainian film director who was also interested in the subject. We immediately abandoned our work and went to visit a displaced persons’ centre outside Kyiv. When we got there, it became clear that we weren’t going to do the workshops after all – we immersed ourselves in the life of the centre. That was the beginning of our lovely friendship with the Crimean Tatars.
BS: What did they tell you during your first meetings?
AAG: They spoke about their escape and their abandoned homes, about the vicious circle of history. About how, after decades, they have to go through this all again. The first chilling conversation took place in the dining room. A Crimean Tatar who worked in the centre as a cook told us about her life. It was a lament. She hadn’t yet had time to mourn her parents who were attacked and killed by jackals during the Stalinist deportations of 1944 and now she has to mourn her children who were arrested in Crimea by the Russian security services.
We felt we had to go to Crimea and to speak with those who remained behind. Those whom we’d come to know in the refugee centre gave us contact information for their families. The trip was made possible by two people: Mustafa Dzhemilev, the leader of the Crimean Tatar community, who helped us get into Crimea with our film equipment, and my producer, Mirek Dembiński, who joined this project without any guarantee that we would get the funding needed to make it happen. Thanks to him, I was able to travel to Crimea as early as May 2014.
From then to the summer of 2015, I went there a total of four times. I saw how the despair and resistance to the new political order slowly descended into a soul-crushing stupor of listlessness and depression.
BS: Was it hard to get a camera into Crimea?
AAG: When we crossed the border the first time, we said that we were going climbing. We had our camera equipment hidden in sleeping bags and amongst our clothes. On top, we piled on ropes, harnesses and such and the border guards treated us as if we were climbers. There are a lot of climbing trails in Crimea and we said that’s where we were going.
Then the situation in Crimea got to be more difficult and it was harder to get in. Our strategy for crossing the border with our camera equipment became far more complicated. Sometimes, we sent the equipment ahead of us and picked it up clandestinely on arrival. I can’t talk too much about it, but you could write it as an action film script including a few breathtaking chase scenes.
BS: Why all the secrecy?
AAG: You can’t make films in Crimea if they don’t agree with the viewpoint of the new authorities. If the authorities get their hands on a film crew on the peninsula, you have to expect interrogations. It was in Crimea in May 2014 that Oleg Sentsov, a Ukrainian filmmaker, was arrested. After being accused of terrorist activity, he was sentenced to twenty years in a labour camp. We tried to keep our work on the film a secret out of concern for ourselves and those who appeared in the film. We hid discs containing recorded material in our backpacks amongst our clothes. After a number of filming expeditions, our material crossed the border well after us and reached us in Poland several weeks later. Many people assisted us.
BS: In your final credits, you don’t name those who appeared; you just give their initials. Why is that?
AAG: Out of concern for the safety of those people. Speaking before a camera puts them right in the crosshairs of the security services.
BS: In that case, why did they decide to take part in the film? What drove them?
AAG: Dignity and a need for dialogue. They have a need to tell about their drama and about the changes that have taken place in Crimea. Not because their story can change something or provoke a political response from the West. If they choose to stand before the camera, it comes from a need to explain themselves. It’s an act of fighting for their own dignity and a desire to communicate with the world.
The Crimean Tatars carry with them a feeling that they are locked behind iron gates which have cut them off from the rest of the world. Our arrival was proof for them that someone is thinking about them and remembers them. When Will This Wind Stop came to be on a wave of mutual affection and of a wish to do something good in the name of freedom.
BS: How does the situation of the Tatars in Crimea look today?
AAG: Just a few weeks after the annexation in 2014, the traditional commemorations were held recalling the deportation of the Tatars in 1944. They have taken place each year for the last 71 years. That year, though, they had a special atmosphere – low over the heads of the people who gathered flew military helicopters and soldiers set their dogs on the participants.
In the referendum organised after the annexation of Crimea, the Tatars sided with Ukraine, which caused them to be targeted by propaganda attacks and political repressions. The Russian security services searched their homes and people were fired from their jobs. Windows of Tatar homes were broken. The Tatar television station and newspapers were shut down and the Tatar language was removed from schools. There are also cases of disappearances: people pulled from their homes and later their bodies are found with signs of torture or with dirt in their lungs. At the same time, Russian authorities make propaganda proclamations that the new authorities are working together with their Tatar brothers.
Arrests have continued until today. On May 12, 2016, there was a new wave of searches of Tatar homes. The authorities justified it as necessary to fight the Islamic Hizb e-Tahrir Party. Innocent people have been arrested as suspected terrorists.
BS: Did you feel pressure from the authorities while you were there?
AAG: During the making of the film, I had crank calls – hang-ups – from Russia. Lately, my co-workers and their families have been getting them, too. It all creates an atmosphere of discomfort and a sense of threat hanging over us. But, at the same time, it remains invisible. You don’t go to the press to complain that you’ve had a crank call from Russia, because it sounds like the raving of a paranoid person. But that’s how the Russian services work.
People in Crimea are aware that their enemy operates under an invisibility cloak, so it’s hard to talk about what’s happening or to show proof of it, even though you feel its effects at every step of the way. Using ongoing arrests and searches, they create an atmosphere of fear and build walls of distrust.
BS: How do their Russian neighbours react to the Tatars?
AAG: The Russian residents of Crimea are mostly antagonistic to the Tatar minority, but there are also some friendships between Tatars and Russians. In Crimea, there are many mixed marriages in which the husband is Russian and the wife a Ukrainian Tatar. Often different nationalities and points of view meet under a single roof.
The son of one of our people is good friends with a Russian fellow in the neighbourhood. Their friendship doesn’t bother anyone. Our Tatar friends don’t harbour anger; they just feel great sadness that they can’t openly talk about what they think, that they can’t gather together and observe their own festivals.
In the film, I didn’t want to present a black-and-white vision of the world in which Russians are aggressive and evil, but the Tatars are impeccable. Those sorts of divisions destroy human relationships. In this case, it’s politics that altered the world of regular people and made enemies of them. Our film wasn’t made to report information: that’s what the press is for. Instead, we wanted to capture the emotions around the whole situation, the feelings of a person living in a divided world where there’s discrimination and walls have been raised between people, destroying their hearts and souls.
After the annexation of Crimea, it stopped being a tourist destination. More often than tourists, you see soldiers there, because Crimea is gradually becoming a large military base. From a peninsula where Ukrainians, Russians, Tatars, Greeks and Cypriots once lived side by side, today you have all those who can no longer feel at home there leaving for other places.
BS: What is the scale of this exodus?
AAG: A year after the annexation, we had information about some 20,000 Tatars who had left the peninsula. That’s a lot if we keep in mind that about 300,000 lived there before. Today, it’s said that over 30,000 Tatars have left Crimea. That number keeps growing, but the number of those leaving has no significance here; what is more important is the mechanism of political oppression which divides families and destroys individuals.
Translated from Polish by Yale Reisner
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