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Interviews Jessica Gorter. “I’m interested in how memory is inherently subjective, shaped by time, emotion, and experience”
Filming from under a history in erasure: Jessica Gorter’s documentary films about Russia’s memory and counter-memory.
Published in the printed edition of Baltic Worlds BW 2025:4, pages 46-55
Published on balticworlds.com on December 18, 2025
In two separate occasions in 2024, filmmaker Jessica Gorter’s The Dmitriev Affair (2023) and 900 Days (2011) were screened at Zita Folkets Bio in central Stockholm. Even though the films attracted a considerable audience, and both screenings were followed by a director talk and comments by experts, there remained that uncertain feeling that we do not fully know or understand what we are seeing on the screen or hearing in Jessica’s conversations with the film’s characters. Jessica Gorter’s direct style in documentary film-making addresses the repressed, vanishing, and already almost nonexistent counter-memory of the witnesses. By taking an angle beneath the veneer of official celebratory histories, she effectively undermines stereotypes, images, and rhetorical figures in the established narratives concerning Putin’s Russia and its historical memory. The problems of the documentary as such raise several questions, as does the role of documentary cinema supporting counter-memory that is being actively suppressed by a political regime that uses the past as a war weapon and an instrument of internal political repression. One question that arose in the discussion was how the loss of history is conducive to the eventual loss of democracy, Russia’s condition nowadays appearing a warning. Not to repeat the misfortune of Cassandra whose warnings no one could understand, we decided to publish an abridged version of two long conversations we had with Jessica, with whom we have become friends: We hope to continue working together after those memorable events in Stockholm. As the initial idea came from Irina Sandomirskaja, she felt free to enlarge the transcription with some further comments.
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