Subject: FW: Red Terror on the Amber Coast PBS initial broadcasts & potential for expanded broadcast nationwide!

Subject: FW: Red Terror on the Amber Coast  PBS  initial broadcasts & potential for expanded broadcast nationwide!

Documentary focuses on Lithuanian resistance to Soviet control

"When to Watch....

Red Terror on the Amber Coast

Rhode Island PBS Channel 36
Repeat broadcast Sunday, January 18, 2009
11:30 PM"
 
 
Powerful favorable analysis by PBS Channel 36 critic, Michael Janonis. The critique below can be part of our email and phone contact campaign targetting individual PBS staions wherever we live in the U.S. This includes Chicago, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Boston, Hartford, Arizona, Texas, New Jersey, New York areas, etc....
 
Go to the active link below.......
 

"Have a question or comment about the scheduling of a program?

 
Contact your local PBS station because all scheduling decisions are made locally."
 
 
 The local station will have phone numbers and an email address for program requests and scheduling. Please state that there was  great positive public response to the Rhode Island broadcast, January 8 and that you strongly suggest that they schedule Red Terror on the Amber Coast in the very near future. Use all or parts of the Providence Journal-Bulletin review below. You can cut and paste parts if you wish. The idea is to bombard stations locally until they schedule showings. As you get favorable response send back that information to me or Fr. Dave O'Rourke immediately. As stations begin to schedule, more pressure can be put on others until we get nationwide coverage. This is the start to a historic & successful campaign during 2009. Make this a project for your Baltic group or organization a dedicationto the dissidents and freedom fighters who gave everything for the survival of their nation. We can get the needed American audience. Red Terror is History 101 for most Americans.  Pass it on....
Much appreciation.
Tony Mazeika
Tony Mazeika    tony@tonymazeika.com

Fr. David O'Rourke   dkorop@sbcglobal.net
 
 
          ========================================================================
Providence Journal-Bulletin,   01:00 AM EST on Thursday, January 8, 2009                                                                      

  By Michael Janusonis        Journal Arts Writer

Documentary focuses on Lithuanian resistance to Soviet control

     From Red Terror on the Amber Coast: Anonymous victims of Stalin’s slave labor system, known only by a chance photograph that somehow survived.
Adolf Hitler’s mad plan to exterminate the Jews of Europe during the darkest days of World War II is by now well known to most Americans thanks to books, feature films and documentaries.
But Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s attempts to change the face of Eastern Europe by removing dissidents from the Baltic countries — Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia — ship them to slave labor camps in Siberia and replace them with Communist toadies through a regime of police terror has been nearly lost to history. Until now.
Tonight at 10, Channel 36 will present the hour-long documentary Red Terror on the Amber Coast, which focuses on Lithuanian resistance to Soviet control from 1939 to 1993, from the start of World War II when Stalin and Hitler signed their infamous non-aggression pact to the days when the Iron Curtain was finally lifted on the Baltic states and Communist rule came to an end.
The film was directed by the Rev. Kenneth Gumbert, a Dominican priest who directs the film and video program at Providence College. Father Gumbert also co-wrote and co-produced the film with California-based Rev. David O’Rourke who is director of the Tatra Project, a nonprofit organization that supports education about life in the former Soviet Union.
Red Terror is a fascinating film that dispels the glamour that some films and books have bestowed on Communism. It uses graphic archival photos and newsreel footage along with eyewitness accounts by survivors in the Lithuanian resistance movement to show some of the atrocities committed by the Soviets.
Some of the stories are poignant, such as the tale told by an elderly woman of how, when she was 11, she, her mother and siblings were separated from her father as they were being deported in cattle cars to Siberia. It was only decades later that she discovered what had happened to him in files of the KGB, the Soviet spy organization.
Some of the stories are scary, such as one told by a woman who was arrested while she was typing articles for an anti-Soviet underground newspaper and sent to a “psychiatric” hospital where electric shock therapy was the norm. There are tales from survivors of slave labor camps and a KGB prison and a woman who was asked to betray her husband.
There are harrowing photos of the corpses of young resistance fighters who were lined up and shot in city squares, their bodies left to rot there by KGB collaborators as a warning to others.
But there also are heroic stories of how the resistance to Soviet control was started by children — many of the adults having been spirited away to Siberia — who refused to be forced into induction into the Red Army and how they built secret underground bunkers in the forests. There’s even an excerpt from a KGB training film showing soldiers poking sticks into the ground in an attempt to find the bunker hiding places.
Out of a population of 2½ million in Lithuania at the start of World War II, it is said that 350,000 people were sent to Siberia by the Communists.
Father Gumbert says he became fascinated with this story in 2001 while working in the Czech Republic on his award-winning film Saving Grace, about the repression of civil and religious rights in Czechoslovakia after the Communist takeover in 1948 and the establishment of an underground church there. During his stay he visited his filmmaking partner, Father O’Rourke, who was in Lithuania, where he was introduced to … “the untold story of what it was like to live under a Communist totalitarian regime,” something which dispelled the “romanticism” some people still attach to the Marxist system.
But it wasn’t until June 2006 that their plans came together and they were able to begin filming interviews with everyone from former prisoners, slave laborers and wives of the partisans to the president of the Lithuania Republic, aided by the National Genocide and Resistance Center in Vilnius…Some of the archival photos came from the Lithuanian archives; others from the people they were interviewing. The newsreel images came from the Occupation Museum and Film Archives in Riga, Latvia. “
The result is a moving account of an all-but-forgotten part of World War II and its aftermath. Red Terror on the Amber Coast has already been shown at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., and has been invited to be shown at the Lithuanian Embassy in Washington Feb. 20.  Tonight marks its first broadcast on a Public Broadcasting station, but Father Gumbert says it is already in the mix to make it available to other PBS stations around the country.   

 Red Terror on the Amber Coast will be broadcast at 10 p.m. today on Channel 36.                                                    Â