Juris Podnieks (1950-1992)
There are so many stories to tell about Latvian born film maker Juris Podnieks.
But the story I want to tell now took place in Yalta, Crimea.
A couple of days earlier I’d received a panic phone call from Stepan Pojenian, the Deputy Director (de facto the Moscow boss) of the Soviet British Creative Association (SBCA), which we had spend two years setting up and which was heralded on 10 Downing Street letterhead by Margaret Thatcher. Stepan told me that:
I called Juris and suggested that as his flight plans were known he should change them. How about flying via Yalta, which from Moscow’s point of view was off the beaten track? I could set up a meeting there which, an idea was forming in the back of my mind, should resolve things. Juris, relieved I had no intention of persuading him to call off the shoot, agreed. I then called Armen Medvedev, the C
Armen agreed Alexandr Galutvin, his deputy, should meet with Juris and me at Yalta. “Good luck.”
We met at Yalta’s historic Oreanda Hotel. This meeting wasn’t going challenge the 1945 Roosevelt, Stalin, Churchill Yalta Conference for historic significance, but it was important to us.
To cut a good story short we all agreed any 16mm film footage would one day be of historic importance. So it had to be shot and then put into the archives. To ensure there was no ‘mishandling’ the negative would be developed in Goskino’s laboratory. And we agreed this archive footage would only be used in the documentary series Juris was filming for Central Television with Goskino’s agreement.
Juris agreed to this because much of the shoot would be on ‘home’ video cameras, which he’d recently smuggled in after a visit to the UK. I was also confident that as the SBCA was a Goskino joint venture the chances of the 16mm footage being released to Central were high.
At the end of the day Goskino sent a print of the rushes to the Kremlin and I was told that Gorbachev himself gave the all clear.
