Siveria

On 23 July 2019, the well-known activist Yelena Grigoryeva was assassinated in St. Petersburg. In the years leading up to her assassination, Yelena had dedicated herself to defending the rights of the Russian LGBTI population. Grigoryeva, 41, had reported that she had been receiving threats from homophobic and ultranationalist groups for some time. The police found her body in the street, riddled with stab wounds, hidden behind some bushes.

On 31 January 2014, Yelena Klimova, an activist and founder of a group on the social network Vkontakte, was put on trial. This group publishes letters from LGBTI teenagers in various regions of Russia, and Klimova was accused of generating “homosexual propaganda” and sentenced to pay a fine of 50,000 roubles.

Endorsed by an Honourable Mention in the 2015 Leopoldo Alas Mínguez Prize, Siveria aspires to serve as a tribute to all the Yelenas, finding parallels between fanaticisms and betrayal, with Virginia Woolf and Jeff Buckley’s music as sources of inspiration.
K Producciones

Elena and Kristof are two activists who share a flat in a city in Putin’s Russia. From their flat, they elude government laws prohibiting homosexual propaganda, operating a website that supports LGBTI youth rejected by their own families. Everything seems to be working fine, but the secret police have been closing in on them and one day they arrest Elena. She is subjected to an interrogation in which a ruthless inspector puts her loyalty to the cause for which she has always fought to the test. Based on real events, Siveria uses classic suspense genre structures to loosely recreate the days prior to the arrest and interrogation of the Russian activist Yelena Klimova.