Join the Nanovic Institute for European Studies for an evening with acclaimed German journalist, author and filmmaker, Mario Damolin, who will present two of his documentary works: Tightrope Walk: Remembering Eugenia Ginzburg and Journey into Schizophrenia: Latvia 1944 - Germany 2004. Antonina Aksenova, the adopted daughter of Eugenia Ginzburg, will also be present at the screening.
Free tickets are available at 211 Brownson Hall on a limited basis. Additional tickets ($4-7) may be purchased at the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center ticket office at this link.
“Journey into the Whirlwind” and “Within the Whirlwind” are the titles of Eugenia Ginzburg’s memoirs about her life in the 1930s, her sham trial and conviction, and her imprisonment in a GULAG camp in the Kolyma region in eastern Siberia until the 1950s. Literature Nobel prize winner Heinrich Boell wrote the primary notes for the German version of her memoirs.
Antonina Aksenova is a theatre director in a German-Russian school in Frankfurt/Germany. She was born in the Kolyma Gulag in 1947, and her exact birth date, as well as her genetic mother, are not recorded. In 1949 she was adopted by Eugenia Ginzburg in Magadan. For years she has been collecting material about the life of her adoptive mother. Late in the summer of 2014 she started her last journey to Magadan and the Kolyma region to retrace her mother’s steps.
Mario Damolin, a German documentary film director, accompanied Antonina Aksenova on this journey from Frankfurt via Moscow to Magadan and back to the Moscow Sovremennik Theatre, where Ginzburg’s book “Journey into the Whirlwind” has been staged as a theatre version since 1989.
Mario Damolin, M.A., studied Sociology, Education Science and Politics in Heidelberg. First writer and publisher in printing media (e.g. “psychology today” - German version), book author (“Twilight of the Managers or: The Spiritualization of Economy”). Since 1990, he has been a TV-journalist and documentary film producer and director and lecturer at the Film Academy in Baden-Wuerttemberg/Germany. The documentary “Career into Death” was conferred with the national prize for the best economical film in Germany 1995. The documentary "The Courier" was honoured at the 4th International Human Rights Film Festival "Stalker" in Moscow 1998 as the best foreign production. The documentary “Journey into Schizophrenia” has been awarded with a second prize at the 10th International Film Festival “Golden Tambourine” 2006 in Khanty-Mansiysk.
Please see the attached poster for additional information: Forms of Realism Film Series: An Evening with Mario Damolin