Keep My Words Forever: Film screening and discussion with Roma Liberov

A film about the fate of a Russian poet.

Osip Mandelstam’s story epitomises the fate of Russian poets.

The Soviet state strove to kill him and to obliterate his poems.

They succeeded in extinguishing his life, but not his work: cold, starvation and torture drove him to madness and death in the camps, yet his poems lived on. His wife, Nadezhda Mandelstam, saved them by memorising everything he had written and keeping them until milder times.

Thanks to her, we know many poems, including the incomparable ‘Keep my words forever, because of their taste of unhappiness and smoke..’

This is the story of the poet, remade at the intersection of different arts and genres: puppet theatre, animation, computer graphics, and documentary.

In Russian with English subtitles. Followed by Q&A with Roma Liberov.