A Bitter Taste of Freedom

The Russian journalist and human rights activist Anna Politkovskaya dedicated her life to denouncing atrocities in her country. Her personal reporting on the wars in Chechnya and the fate of Chechen refugees garnered her international fame and numerous awards, but also staunch opposition. On October 7, 2006, she was murdered in the elevator of her Moscow apartment building, and the perpetrator is at large to this day. Director and close friend Marina Goldovskaya filmed Politkovskaya, who was known by colleagues as "Russia's conscience," over a period of 15 years. Starting in the early 1990s, when she still lived with her former husband, the popular TV journalist Alexander Politkovsky, but also later as she came into the limelight and made her views on the Chechen conflict known, using her investigative journalism to bring attention to war crimes. Goldovskaya also shows her role as a mediator in the Dubrovka Theater and Beslan school hostage crises. The documentary offers a portrait of a passionate and pugnacious woman who despite it all continued to dream of a greater country, but it also shows how the hope for democracy in post-communist Russia is gradually disappearing for an entire generation of people.