|
Documentary cinemaChildren of the Saints Genre: Culture and Education Screen Writer: Yevgeniy Kukarin
The title of the film is self explanatory about who and what it is.
They are Saints and they are very close to us as much as it can be. The church tradition dictates that there should pass several decades from death to canonization to sainthood. The new martyrs left their descendents with us, their children. Our film story is based on getting to know them.
YELIZAVETA MAKAROVA, now dead, was the daughter of a priest in the village of Ivanovo, Vladimir Region, who was shot in 1937. Her children and grandchildren have probably come to the church for the first time, when they attended her requiem service, to the church where she was well known and loved and where many kind words have pronounced about her. There remains a video of an educational excursion the daughter of the martyr conducted for local children. Priest SERGIY LABUNSKIY, a clergyman at Kolomna Seminary, came from the old family of the clergy. His great-great-grandfather Priest Fyodor Kryukov was shot on November 11, 1937. Father Superior of Solovki Monastery IANUARIY’s ancestor was executed, too. They are heroes of our film, which is designed as a discussion of continuity of the religious heritage. The history of Russia, from its ancient Russ roots, is a history of its spiritual core. The saints, as one of the clergy says, are its golden chain, to which new links are being added. It also can be compared with a relay race, transferring the spiritual flame from the 1st century to the 21st century, transferring all heritage, knowledge and experience by father to son. There are many examples like this in history. Here is one but a significant example: Saint Admiral Fyodor Ushakov. The entire life of the Russian admiral, from his childhood to his final death, has developed under a benevolent influence of his uncle, His Eminence Fyodor Sanaksarskiy, a great warrior in the field the sacred word. The uncle’s example was a permanent topic of the family discussions and really was an example to follow by the future admiral who was canonized in our days. There is an historical philosophy: years of peace are replaced with catastrophes, crises, wars. Any way it goes, every year’s events are predetermined by the centuries of what had already taken place. These are lessons to follow, which, however, rather remain not followed, including those of current days. It is not easy to find warnings of the past sent to the future in the spiritual sphere. The spiritual life going on inside each of us is not obvious. It is not flashing slogans to outside readers. All the more, it is important to know how to see it, how to see its main portents. Almost every church which was closed in 1930s had its own martyr: a priest, a deacon, a village head executed for mere ties with the Orthodox Church. They might not have been absolutely righteous men but at their final line they had a choice: to renounce their affiliations or die with them. Nonetheless, hundreds of those canonized souls, which are elevated to the sainthood today, showed strength of their faith and the allegiance to the God and the Church. The 20th century Christians did not fight lions and were not sacrificed to pagan gods. A different thing had been done in the last century to deliberately diminish their honour and dignity. While the ancient Christian martyrdom was largely demonstrated to public and was publicly accepted as an example of dying for truth, the persecuted 20th century Christians were not allowed to die as martyrs of truth. They were libeled and shamed as perpetrators of the social order, as dishonest people, as enemies of their nation. The libel from your own people was a horrible thing. They were killed treacherously in secret. Those events did affect people souls. Without examples before their eyes, without the word of the God, our compatriots, in majority, are quite superficial about feats of the Russian martyrs and confessors: they know very little about them. Prelate Vasiliy the Great said: “The ones who revere followers of the faith, do, thus, have the same zeal for the faith. The esteem of them is directly related to the worshipping of Our Lord the Christ, whom they served and for whom they suffered”. Mass repressions resulted in a generation gap. The 20th century disrupted the historical spiritual tradition. Unfortunately, today, only children of martyrs, born in 1920s to 1930s, whose lives were intertwined with their living fathers, can relay to us their knowledge. Some grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the canonized saints do not even visit the church. One of the God’s commandments: “Honour your father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.” is violated and consequences, to our regret, are tragic. But there is hope of resurrection. There is hope that the grains of that memory protected by relatives of martyrs, will be disseminated and give us sprouts of blissful knowledge or the true Christian exploit. Here and now we will attempt to rethink and reassess our times not as a chain of factual events but as a continuity of spirit and it is not only a question of religion. The film does not intend to research questions of the applied theology: “from the general to the specifics”. On the contrary, we are delving into specific fates and finding the completeness of Faith and History. The tragedy of the past century is in the sufferings of those families. The story about significant marks of the history may have such a pitfall that martyrs in the history may be perceived as some abstract entities, which do not touch hearts. Another pitfall is to think about martyrs as useless victims. A trustful and an open talk with every participant in the film about his or her saint relative will bring their specific stories to the level of the general history so that every viewer could grasp and feel that he or she is one of the children of the saint killed in the 1930s, too. Screen writer: Yevgeniy Kukarin
|
