ALUMNA'S DOCUMENTARY SCREENS AT BERLIN INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
Miss GULAG, a documentary feature directed by NSGS Bachelor's Program alumna Maria Yatskova, will screen at the Berlin International Film Festival this February. Miss GULAG shows the individual destinies of three women bound by crime and long sentences at camp UF-91/9. Through the prism of a beauty pageant staged by female prisoners of a Siberian labor camp emerges a complex narrative of the lives of the first generation of women to come of age in Post-Soviet Russia.
Director Maria Yatskova was born in Moscow in 1976 and immigrated to the United States with her mother and grandmother five years later. She studied journalism in France and Belgium and earned her B.A. at The New School in 2004, with a focus on Cinema Studies. Maria's engagement with Russian history began with her feature essay surrounding the controversial remains of Russia's last Czar, which appeared in the Los Angeles Times. More recently, Maria went to live and work as a news anchor in Baku, Azerbaijan, where she reported on the first "democratic" elections for LIDER TV. Her article about prison camp UF 91/9 in Siberia, titled "Crime and Beauty," appeared in the September 2006 issue of Marie-Claire magazine, and provides part of the vision behind her directorial debut, Miss GULAG. Congratulations to Maria!
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