Saratoga Jewish Community Arts Presents a Panel Discussion on Zoom of the 2018 Film Ashes in the Snow, Sunday, November 8 at 7 pm
Saratoga Jewish Community Arts, with the support of a generous grant from the Jewish Federation of Northeastern New York and the sponsorship of Temple Sinai, presents a panel discussion on Zoom of the 2018 film Ashes in the Snow on Sunday, Nov. 8 at 7 pm. Directed by Marius A. Markevičius, the film tells the story of the Soviet Union’s deportation of tens of thousands of Lithuanians to labor camps and the frozen reaches of Siberia during and after World War II, a campaign in which many thousands died.
The Film
Ashes in the Snow is an adaptation of the bestselling historical novel Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys. The story centers on Lina Vilkas (played by famed actress Bel Powley), a 16-year-old aspiring Lithuanian artist whose family is exiled to Siberia during the first wave of Soviet deportations in 1941. Separated from her father and forced into brutal labor, Lina records what she witnesses in her drawings, hoping they will somehow reach him.
While originally seen as a film for young people who knew little about Lithuanian history of the period, it attracted a much broader audience, many of whom also had little or no knowledge of it. “As is true of many who lived through such suffering,” says Phyllis Wang, Coordinator of SJCA, “survivors often are silent to the next generation. It is another time no one talked about, or could talk about, because of the ongoing Russian influence in the area.”
Sepetys did extensive research to make the story as historically accurate as possible, interviewing large numbers of survivors and their descendants, who later agreed that it was true to what they or their families had endured.
The film’s actors come from many countries, including Norway, Sweden, and Great Britain, and all were committed to a project about Lithuania and the Baltics. It is regarded as the first globally distributed, major feature film in English about Lithuania. Many of the extras, and some of the elderly principal actors, were actual survivors who had been deported as children; others are children or grandchildren of survivors. The Lithuanian crews working on the film were not only skilled, but many of them also had a family connection to the horrors of the Siberian experience.
The film raises questions such as what a human life is worth, and it explores the resilience of the human spirit amid systematic oppression and genocide—questions that resonate in so many places around the globe today. Americans in general, and Jews in particular, have heard very little about the history of the Siberian deportations, though they know a bit more about Stalin’s reign of terror. The film may help build awareness of this little-known period. And today, with the situation in Ukraine and tensions with Russia along the Baltic borders, it is important for people to know and understand the past so that it cannot be repeated.
Pre-registration is required.
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