TRF Thy Will be done ENPRO

Genre: Documentary
Format: PAL / SECAM, DV-Cam, DV-Avi
Runtime: 25:45 min
Languages: RU (orig.), EN
Trailers: 1:40; 4:51

Topic: Mikhail Trukhanov spent 16 years in a labour camp under conviction of “reading prohibited religious books” and hardly survived there. Thus he submitted himself to God’s Will and found his vocation. One of his spiritual sons, Fyodor Bokarev, had an analogous experience, when he was arrested and imprisoned after a fight with the son of a diplomat. In the hardships of prison life he experienced his conversion to Christianity…

Plot: "You're sitting here with a criminal…" are the first words of Mikhail Trukhanov. He was the son of a priest, was studying astronomy and did not plan to follow his father's footsteps. After his father was arrested and died at the Kolyma Camp, Mikhail started to live a Christian life. In 1940 at church he met his future wife who is contributing to this film with her testimony about him. Soon Mikhail started to study the Holy Scripture and set up a study group. This activity led soon to the arrest of the participants. When he was convicted to 8 years in a prison camp, his first reaction was to pray the psalms and to thank the Lord. Our second hero, Fyodor Bokarev was always a good Christian child. But when he tried to protect a younger kid, he got into a fight and finally got arrested and imprisoned for having hit the son of the ambassador of a friend-country. His parents saw him only in court and were not allowed to talk with him. He himself took the experience as an expression of the will of God. After serving his sentence he started to study at medical school and knew Mikhail, whom he considered from now on his spiritual guide and father. His mother gives us further inside in the life of Fyodor and confirms that it was her children who brought her to believe in Christ. Fyodor and Mikhail had different fates, but they were both handed a difficult task, and they faced it with humility. Mikhail tells us about his experiences in the camp, where they tried several times to recruit him as an informer for the KGB, without any success. He did not want to do so as he was Christian, and soon he was moved into a penal colony. His intellectual abilities and the prayer to God helped him to stay alive there. He designed tools and equipment for the log work. Mikhail then tells us how under great risk of his life it was possible to receive communion also in the harsh circumstances of the camp. He served 16 years there and was freed only in 1956. Soon after, he was about to be ordained priest but noticed that the KGB had still its informants in the hierarchy of the Orthodox Church. But against the defamation of those informants he finally reached his goal to become a priest.

Artistic Considerations: The film is built on those two stories which crossed each other one day, a sort of spiritual relay from one faith giant to the new generation, for the future development of Christian life in Russia. The film offers rare shootings of the prison system of Russia and the related problem of deviance. Short sequences utilizing paintings by Pavel Filonov and modern music point out the dramatic moments of these stories.