Letter to Anna

Followed by a meeting with director Eric Bergkraut

Switzerland / Germany, 2008, 83’

On October 7, 2006, Vladimir Putin’s 54th birthday, journalist Anna Politkovskaya is shot in the lift of her Moscow home. Anna’s death is a personal tragedy: she has just learned that she is to become a grandmother. But the murder is also a political act, for Politkovskaya was the President’s fiercest critic. Why was she shot in cold blood, this elegant woman who was always on the side of the weak and those who had no rights? Was it because of the stance she took against the war in Chechnya – a war that was virtually ignored in the world at large and yet became a turning point in Anna’s life? – Letter to Anna – is a personal quest, but also a political film.

Director Eric Bergkraut met Anna Politkovskaya in 2003 while making a film about human rights activists in Chechnya. The film, Letter to Anna, contains many of the conversations they had at that time, as well as interviews with Boris Berezovsky, Garry Kasparov, the editor of Novaja Gazeta Dmtriy Muratov, and Anna’s children Ilya and Vera. The film is narrated by Susan Sarandon.

Directed by Eric Bergkraut

Produced by p.s.72productions, zero one film