When Will This Wind Stop: Warsaw, Belsat TV premiere film about Crimean Tatars deportation
The film by Polish director Aniela Astrid Gabryel tells viewers about the present-day ‘self-deportation’ of Crimean Tatar families broken by the Russian occupation. The premiere show took place on Wednesday in the Warsaw Palace of Culture and Science as part of the 13th Film Festival Millenium Docs Against Gravity.
Our channel broadcast When Will This Wind Stop which was created with the participation of Belsat TV immediately after the premiere screening.
To shoot it, the Polish-Ukrainian film crew visited the annexed peninsula four times.
“We were filming illegally, Crimean Tatar activists helped us deliver all the necessary equipment at the request of [their leader] Mustafa Dzhemilev,” the film director (see the photo below) said.
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Before the screening a video address of Mustafa Dzhemilev was shown. He reminded the viewers of the 1944 deportation of Crimean Tatars.
Perhaps, ‘self-deportation’ is the most appropriate word to describe what the characters of the documentary are going through now.
“We dreamed of returning to our homeland. You cannot leave it now,” says an old man who was deported in 1944.
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But far from everybody can live in fear. Young people go to Ukraine, and their parents stay in Crimea, because they do not want to ‘give their homes to Putin’.
After the annexation of the peninsula, many Crimean Tatars who were protesting against the newly-baked authorities had to flee from the occupied territory. In 1944, Josef Stalin ordered to deport over 250,000 Crimean Tatars to Asian Soviet republics. In the late 80s, when the Soviet Union was in decline, they started to return. Unfortunately, at the moment history is repeating itself and Crimean Tatars have to depart again.
Read also: In the wake of Eurovision-2016. Crimean Days on Belsat TV
