“ArtMoscovia”: “Frozen Fish, Warm Voices…” Documentary Film by Tamara Sushko and the 75th Anniversary of Victory Day

14/04/2020 08:00

“ArtMoscowia” publishes reviews of the films of the Sevastopol International Festival of Documentary Films and TV Programs “VICTORIOUS TOGETHER”, a joint project of the Council for Film and Video Visualization of the Cultural and Historical Space of Eurasia of the Eurasian Peoples' Assembly, the Eurasian Academy of Television and Radio, the Government of Sevastopol, and “Channel One. World Wide Web” - Victory Channel.

Many people know about Soviet prisoners of war in Germany during the Great Patriotic war, much less about the fact that our prisoners of war and those taken to forced labor were not only there, but also in German-occupied Norway. And yet, they were there: hundreds of girls and boys from Leningrad, Bryansk, Ukraine...

There, in Northern Norway, they worked at a fish factory in Bodo: 1.5 thousand women from the USSR. There, in captivity, 139 children were born, one of them is the hero of the film — Yuri Salnikov, son of Galina Korolenko and Fedor Salnikov.

Tamara Sushko's film “Frozen Fish, Warm Voices…” (Russia/Sweden, 2018) sends the viewer to Leningrad, destroyed by the war, then to modern Saint Petersburg, where Yuri Salnikov and his family now live, then to Norway - cold, gloomy, stingy with the colors of nature, but where Norwegians live, people who are ready to help in finding answers to long-tormented questions. Dmitry Shostakovich's 7th Symphony is a leitmotif reminding of those terrible days and terrible fates.

The film was shown at the Sevastopol Festival in 2019 and awarded a special Diploma. In the same year, in December, I saw it at the ARCTIC OPEN Festival in Arkhangelsk. There, too, it received a special Diploma “For Discovering a Family Story that is shared by Thousands and Thousands of People and For Restoring Memory.” Now, on the eve of the Victory Day, I remember this film again.

Marina Abramova

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