The Russian, East European, & Eurasian Studies presents a Film Screening:
“Black Russians: The Red Experience Documentary.”
With a post screening discussion with the film’s director, Yelena Demikovsky.
Register here: https://bit.ly/REEESEvent-Registration
Black Russians explores the lives of the black Americans who escaped persecution in their native America and dreamed of finding a better life for themselves in the unlikeliest of places: Stalin’s Soviet Union. During the years of the Great Depression, around 200 black Americans whose lives were marred by discrimination and segregation, left their homeland hoping to find a new life in the fledgling communist Soviet Union. Some of them never returned to America. Others came back determined to make a change. This is their story.
Yelena Demikovsky is founder of Red Palette Pictures. Born in Russia, she has lived in the United States for more than 16 years. She is a documentary and narrative filmmaker with a broad theatre background in the United States and Russia. Demikovsky has directed award-winning documentaries such as Unity, The Story Of Fenist , Happy To Be So And Vera. An Intimate Sketch and narrative shorts, Shell and Through The Door. She is in post-production of the documentary, Then Comes The Glory, about famed ballet star, Rudolf Nureyev and Black Russian. In addition, she has written five short scripts, two feature scripts and a two-act play. Demikovsky has produced two symposia about Rudolf Nureyev - one in New York (1997), the other in St. Petersburg, Russia (1998). She also contributed interviews and translations to four authors of Nureyev biographies. She was guest director of the Lincoln Center Directors Lab and directed for Soho Rep in New York City. Demikovsky has two masters degrees, one in theatre (Moscow, Russia), and another in video (Boston, USA) and had taught theatre directing in Moscow.