FACING THE DEAD
(IM ANGESICHT DES TODES)
A production by LICHTBLICK Film

With participation of ZDF / Arte and Media-Programme

2004

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World sales: German United Distributors
World Premiere: San Francisco International Film Festival
Award: Golden Gate Award

Length: 52’

SYNOPSIS
If your parents and all photographs of them disappeared, would you still remember their faces after 50 years? What happens when a whole generation is stripped of images of their loved ones and all visual record of their experience?

In the years that Stalin ruled the Soviet Union, some 20 million people, so-called “enemies of the state”, were killed or perished in labor camps. To own a photograph of any of these people was itself punishable by death. Families cut loved ones out of group portraits, school children blacked revolutionary heroes out of their history books, and the secret police destroyed whatever was left.

In FACING THE DEAD, filmmaker Gabrielle Pfeiffer travels through today’s Russia on a quest for the lost faces of a generation.