Olga Kravets
Filmmaker

I tell stories that question the present through investigating the past. My film practice grew out of the rigour of journalistic method and photographic composition.

I learnt on the job: fixing for The Sunday Times at Beslan, assisting a photographer in Grozny during the second Chechen war, then the youngest hire at the BBC Russian Service in Moscow. After graduating I left Russia for an international career — first freelance photojournalist, then filmmaker. I was based in Abkhazia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Israel before completing a Master's degree at the University of the Arts London and settling in Paris.

In 2016, I directed my debut documentary, It's Getting Dark, the story of five families of political prisoners across Russia through time. It premiered at IDFA in Amsterdam. I worked with the question of historical memory in Russia, inspired by a former Gulag prisoner who told me she saw history repeating itself in modern Russia while citizens turned a blind eye to it.

In 2018, together with fellow authors Oksana Yushko and Maria Morina and curator Anna Shpakova, I completed Grozny: Nine Cities, a cross-media project almost a decade in the making.

We combined investigative journalism, documentary photography, video and archives to produce a three-screen museum installation, an open-access web documentary, and a book telling the story of the aftermath of two wars Russia waged in Chechnya. The project was published, awarded and exhibited internationally, including at Rencontres d'Arles and in Kyiv following the Russian annexation of Crimea.

In 2022, I published my second book, More Fear Than Allah, on the persecution of Russian converts to Islam by security services, in which I broke away from journalism and embraced engaged authorship.

Alongside my own projects, I direct and produce for institutions and brands that share my values, accompany fellow artists as a creative producer or mentor, and collaborate with NGOs specialising on Ukraine, Russia and the Caucasus.

Rising Is a State of Mind, my film in progress, is a train and time travel from France into wartime Kyiv, investigating the Ukrainian history of my family that Russian colonialism tried to erase — made with the Finnish singer-songwriter Anni Pohto.

A geopolitical documentary from Middle East is finished and awaiting broadcast, and a mockumentary, Dr. Guglielmo Wilhelm, is currently in the edit. Stay tuned!