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Moyshe Beregovsky, a musician and scholar, crisscrossed Ukraine with phonograph in hand during the most dramatic years of Soviet history in order to record and study the traditional music of Ukrainian Jewry. His work began in the 1920’s and led to his arrest and imprisonment in a Stalinist labor camp in 1950. Most of those he recorded on hundreds of fragile wax cylinders were shot by the Nazis and tossed into countless mass graves. Ultimately, Beregovsky succeeded in saving the musical heritage of the centuries-old Yiddish civilization. He rescued the Living Voice of his people from the flames of the Holocaust but paid for it with his life.
Elena Yakovich was born in Moscow, Russia, where she graduated from the journalism department at Moscow State University. She successfully worked as a journalist for one of the leading Russian newspapers, Literaturnaya Gazeta. Since 1993 she has been engaged in the production of television documentaries for major TV stations. During that time, she created more than 100 movies and TV shows and has won nine awards at different Film Festivals in different categories. Yakovich is one of the few women documentary filmmakers in Russia and is one of the few who has worked to document the Holocaust in film.
A key methodology of her documentary practice, for which she is well known, is to visit the locales which her films historicize, sites where significant events happened. In the process, she has cultivated a striking talent to create unforgettable stories about the events for contemporary viewers.
