"HerSons" | film - Instytut Pileckiego

“HerSons” is a film made by Hanna Berehova based on testimonies gathered by the Raphael Lemkin Center for Documenting Russian Crimes in Ukraine.

Almost immediately after the outbreak of war in Ukraine on 24 February 2022, the Pilecki Institute took steps to document Russian crimes. To this end, it established the so-called Lemkin Center, which began collecting eyewitness accounts of the horrific events taking place just across Poland’s eastern border. From these harrowing reports emerges a picture of the criminal Russian system, which, tragically, is very well known to us from Polish history: deportations and torture, the murder of civilians and kidnapping of children, the devastation of cultural property, and the destruction of collective memory.

“HerSons” by Hanna Berehova presents the story of four residents of Kherson who were kidnapped from their hometown, deported to Crimea, and thereafter incarcerated at Lefortovo Prison in Moscow. While in Kherson and Crimea, they were beaten and variously tortured – among others with electricity. Their relatives have no direct contact with them to date. One of the families managed to hire a Russian lawyer and occasionally receives information, but the rest live in a complete informational vacuum. The arrestees are not prisoners of war, for they were detained as civilians, and thus do not figure on any exchange lists. According to international conventions, the Russians should have released them immediately, however instead they kidnapped them to Russia, where they are being tried as terrorists. As we follow their lives, we learn about the mechanisms used by the Russian Federation to violate human rights – from unjustified detention to outright physical extermination. The entire narrative of the film is based on testimonies gathered by the Lemkin Center.

The film is in Ukrainian with Polish subtitles.