Olga Lucovnicova’s 90-minute Last Letters From My Grandma, currently in development and a co-production between Belgium, Germany, Netherlands and Moldova, underwent a major change in emphasis following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The project is budgeted at €465,720 with €70,000 still to be raised.
After Lucovnicova found old letters from her Russian grandmother, who committed suicide in 1989, just as the USSR began to fall apart, the director felt compelled to travel from Europe to Russia in order to unravel deep-rooted family secrets. She discovered that there were several suicides in the family. Her great-great-grandfather jumped under a train after returning from the First World War. Her 14-year-old second cousin overdosed with pills a few years back. In her film therefore she looked to draw a parallel between their tragic fates and that of Soviet and Russian history.
“Suddenly everything changes when Russia starts the war in Ukraine. People become less talkative. Their feelings and opinions become completely incompatible. Censorship, fear and silence are taking more and more space,” says Lucovnicova in her notes for the project.
Talking to Business Doc Europe when she first pitched her project at the Flemish forum Connext, she explained the intensely personal aspect of the story she is telling, after the discovery of her grandmother’s correspondences.
“These [are] letters which are all older than me, and in these letters I could read for the first time about her life from her point of view, because I never met her,” she said. “But at the same time, all my life, I heard from my father that I’m very similar to her. So in a way I am searching for myself through discovering who my grandmother was.”
The letters, Lucovnicova added, offer an alternative history of that time, or talk about things which recorded history ignored or deemed not important enough to chronicle. “That’s why I feel that my grandmother is a kind of symbol of an era. So it’s not just a private story, but also a universal story.”
Lucovnicova further stressed to BDE how difficult it can be for the subjects of documentaries to allow close scrutiny of their personal lives. She refers to it as “an invasion” and one that she experienced herself in making her painfully honest My Uncle Tudor, when she first told her own history (or at least part of it) in documentary. But in revealing something which is “untold and hidden” via such close analysis (and in this she derives inspiration from the films of the legendary Chantal Ackermann and Dutch filmmaker Aliona van der Horst) it is easier to reach “this point of knowledge,” she acknowledged.
In the film, trains will be a leitmotif. It is the mode of transport that will take her and her father back to where he lived, back to the flat in Russia which was “the witness to the happiest and hardest moments of my family history.” It was on a train that her great-great-grandfather died, and her grandmother had earlier tried to commit suicide by throwing herself under a passing locomotive. In the same year nearly 600 Soviet holidaymakers were killed in the nearby Ufa train disaster as a result of a gas leak from a faulty pipeline.
In her notes, Lucovnicova further underlines the importance and relevance of her story right now. “This film is an urgent dialogue between the old and young generation of the Soviet era; between the past, which disappears, and the present, which carries the scars with it and repeats history. A film that makes us better understand the legacy of a superpower and searches for a way to break free from the imperial mind in order to build a free, healthy and democratic society of the future.”
