[vc_row][vc_column][vc_video link=”https://youtu.be/0ZeQGcvgpbQ”][vc_column_text]The film about the deportation of Crimean Tatars is called “Haytarma”.
All for one
The film takes viewers into 1944. The Red Army is driving the Germans from Crimea, on May 17 Air Force Major and Soviet Union hero Ahmet-Khan Sultan arrives on his fighter from the frontline airfield for a short vacation in his native Alupka. The next morning, on Stalin’s orders begins cleanup of the peninsula from the Tatars – the were called traitors and servants of Hitler.
People get thrown out of their houses, allowing to take only a two-day supply of food. Thousands of women, children and the elderly are loaded into trains and taken to Uzbekistan. There are no men. Fifty thousand Crimean Tatars are fighting in the ranks of the Red Army, and those who during the occupation were in the German troops (there were about 15 thousand) left to the west with the Wehrmacht .
Stalin, guided by the Bolshevik favorite principle of collective responsibility, called the whole people traitors subject to punishment with exile into distant inhospitable place.
The film was shot in Alupka and Sudak near Bakhchisarai – former capital of the Crimean Khanate. The crowd scenes involved 1,500 people – including those who themselves survived deportation of 1944.
The film premiered in Simferopol on May 17 – on the 69th anniversary of the deportations. A delegation of Russian pilots arrived from Moscow for the premiere which the Russian Consul General in Simferopol recommended not to attend because “the film distorted the history of the Great Patriotic War.”
The journalist, who had noted that the Consul General insulted Crimean Tatars was asked by Vladimir Andreyev “to write down his words and play to each Crimean Tatar”:
“My word and the word of Russia must be made public, should be known. Including my interview today so that the truth about the Great Patriotic War became known. Including the episodes, which for some reason are silenced on May 18. This film does not have them. This is the betrayal theme. ”
Anti-totalitarian equals anti-Russian
In 2014 the Russian Academy of Motion Picture Arts awarded “Haytarma” with Nika Prize as the best film of CIS and Baltic countries, but later the Russian Ministry of Culture denied “Haytarma” a distribution certificate – that is, it banned the film from screening.
The producer and the author of the idea Lenur Islyamov said that the film is not anti-Russian but anti-totalitarian:
“Komsomolskaya Pravda” wrote that “Haytarma” was to include intense anti-Russian episodes: for example, an episode in which the NKVD officer is urinating on Tatar children and the elderly, driven into the train. It allegedly was not filmed because not a single Russian actor agreed to play in the scenes that cast a shadow on the memory of his people. However, there was nothing of the sort in the script. We filmed not an anti-Russian but an anti-totalitarian movie. The fact is that not all in Russia understand this difference.”
What is Haytarma?
“Haytarma” in Tatar means “return”, as well as a folk dance.
“Haytarma” premieres on “Belsat” on Thursday, May 19 at 22:35
