Backstory

IN THE SUMMER OF 2000 filmmaker Ken Gumbert and writer Dave O’Rourke went to Eastern Europe shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union – Ken to Czechoslovakia, Dave to Lithuania and the Baltics. We were there to observe and record what we saw.  Ken was already at work on Saving Grace about the Soviet seizure of power in Czechoslovakia in 1948 when Dave, by accident, wandered into the unlocked KGB prison in Vilnius.  What we saw led to our production of Red Terror on the Amber Coast, and setting up the Tatra Project to support our work. 

How we got there is worth recalling. 

Ken and I began with almost tourist-like first exposures to what had been a closed book to Westerners.  But then, as we moved into their worlds, the reality of what it was like to live and work with people who, every day for fifty years, had lived under Soviet terror, became a real assault on who and what we were and brought with us.  We know what we want to know.  And we had to figure out why we wanted to know so little since the knowledge was there.

Americans are accustomed to having their worlds explained to them almost relentlessly by every kind of  media describing all aspects of our histories, cultures, peoples, over and over again, almost with no stop.  In the Soviet world there were no media—only the state views and voices.  There were no billboards.  No TV advertisements.  The State told them what was going on. Curiosity is a danger, not an asset.  It is not necessary to figure out what is going on—in fact it is dangerous to even try.  It takes a long time learn what “every family lost someone” means.  And learning it comes only after you have earned trust, and that in a world where you don’t know it can be earned.

An hour-long documentary uses only about twenty five minutes of  excerpts from many hours of filmed interviews.  We filmed about twenty hours of interviews for Red Terror.  We have known from the start that the entire collection of interviews is such an extraordinary, visual archive of the terrible roles of state-sponsored terror in our own history.  Fortunately in the past few years real advances in film editing programs and equipment have lowered the costs, shortened the time, and raised the quality of edited films. So we have chosen to go ahead, edit the interviews, and place  access to all of them on the internet.

I mention my accidental wandering into the terrible cells in the KGB prison, as I note below. So I contacted Ken right away and told him that I, a writer, wanted to do a photo essay on what I saw. Ken, the film-maker, said no, it is much too big a story for that. It demands a documentary film, and we have to make it.

Almost by accident the team of filmmaker Ken Gumbert and writer David O’Rourke had the doors to this terrible history opened up to them. They decided to tell the story of these fifty years and set up the Tatra Project to sponsor their work.