Marijas Klusums or Maria’s Silence is the newest film to be directed by Latvian-born Davis Simanis. Simanis has recently highlighted some similarities between the story of the film, based on a real person and what is currently happening in the world.
Releasing this Sunday at the Berlinale as part of its Forum program, according to The Hollywood Reporter, the film focuses on Maria Leiko, a Latvian actress faced with deciding whether to continue acting in Nazi Germany or move to the USSR to support a granddaughter whose existence she just became aware of.
The film takes place during Joseph Stalin’s USSR and if Leiko moved there and continued her acting, she would inevitably become one of the numerous lives that were snuffed out during that period.
Simanis is bringing in connections between Leiko’s story and how she was worshipped as a queen by Russian politicians to current-day Russia and how some American stars have developed friendships with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Simanis told THR, “With Maria, she was at first dazed by the glamor of the Russian elites and felt flattered. Today, people like her who are used by the (Putin) regime quite well understand what they are doing.”
Even with these surface-level friendships, Simanis said that politicians are only using famous people as leverage to show the world how much power they have. Simanis also found similarities between the recent death of Alexei Navalny, a Russian politician who was anti-Kremlin and anti-Putin, to the purges in Stalin’s USSR that focused on silencing opposition and minorities throughout the country.
It is films like these that not only tell a true story that could have been lost to the annals of time but also bring up topics that are currently happening and being discussed that are important in today’s media landscape.
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