From Stalin to Putin: The Fate of Ukraine in the Film “Family Album”
Film Screening and Discussion, June 1, 2026, 6:00 p.m. with director Maryna Tkachuk (Kyiv), historian Dr. Gerhard Gnauck, and media scholar Prof. Marion Jenke
Film University, Marlene-Dietrich-Allee 11, Room 1104 (Großes Kino), 14482 Potsdam-Babelsberg. Free admission.
A Family History: British photographer Samara Pearce comes into possession of the old Leica belonging to her Austrian-Jewish great-grandfather Alexander Wienerberger, along with two photo albums full of secret photographs of the Holodomor. Young Ukrainian director Maryna Tkachuk takes this as the starting point for a moving documentary film. It begins with the Holodomor, the famine in Ukraine in 1932–33 caused by Stalin’s policies. Samara discovers her life’s theme in her family history, as her great-grandfather was working as an engineer for the Soviet regime at the time and, by chance, became the most important photographic chronicler of the famine, which claimed some 4 million lives in Ukraine.
Since 2022, the photographer has been traveling to the regions where her great-grandfather took his photographs. Maryna Tkachuk accompanied her with a film camera. In Kharkiv and the surrounding area, Samara visits people standing before the ruins of their homes and enters a forest where a mass grave was created during the temporary Russian occupation of the region. Some of the residents, including Yevhen Sakharov, arguably Ukraine’s best-known civil rights activist, describe Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression and its ideological justification in the film as a direct continuation of Joseph Stalin’s genocidal policies.
The film (80 minutes), shot in 2024, has not yet been shown in German theaters. In Potsdam, it will be screened in the original languages (English/Ukrainian/German) with English subtitles. Directions to the Film University
The film screening takes place in conjunction with an exhibition on the Holodomor, which will be on view until July 2, 2026, at the University of Potsdam, Campus Am Neuen Palais 10, Building 11, Säulenhalle. Title: “Why Are You Still Alive?” The exhibition is a project of the Mykola Haievoi Center for Modern History.