"ANTHROPOPHAGE"       

Documentary "ANTHROPOPHAGE" (2022) opens the "black box" so that we can hear the recorded voices of the survivors of the Famine in 1946-1947 Bulgarians in region Bessarabia, Ukraine. The stories bear witness to the severe consequences of the violent hunger to which people were subjected and its final phase - anthropophagy (cannibalism).

 

Let's open together the "black box" of the Truth.

In May 2018, Yona started the shooting of the documentary "ANTHROPOPHAGE" in a number of villages in Ukraine, presenting personal stories of starvation and anthropophagy (cannibalism) in the Odessa region in Ukraine in 1946-1947.

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Hunger suppresses the unconditional reflex in people who have reached cannibalism. This characterizes the historical periods of social transformations, wars, epidemics.

The bark of social forms of behavior is destroyed, the fire of biological impulses erupts and instead of a cultural socius, you see a wild animal, completely unlike a cultural being.

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Provoked by missing information in official documents of the prosecutor’s office confirming the presence of anthropophagy in Bessarabia in the period 1946-1947, I undertook research through an alternative source of historical information - oral history. I conducted conversations in front of a video camera with 86 people (a total of 20 hours of video recording) from twelve villages (the villages of Glavan, Suvorovo, Kamenka, Bogatoe, Kholmskoe, Vasilievka, Karakurt, Krinichnoe, Orekhovka, the town of Izmail, as well as the villages of Vinogradnoe and Golitsa for the period from 10th April to 21st May 2018). Turning to the living collective memory of local residents, I recorded shared memories of the existence of anthropophagy in their villages.

 

Looking for evidence of anthropophagy, I met a girl Anna in Bolgrad who told me that her grandmother had told her that she had seen documents of people convicted of cannibalism in Bessarabia.

 

Regarding those convicted of anthropophagy, the historian Oleksandra Veselova extracted the following sample from archive documents: "Since the beginning of 1947, the crime-fighting department of the Ukrainian SSR’s Ministry of Internal Affairs investigated 130 cases of cannibalism, 189 eaten human corpses were registered, and 132 people faced the court. Most of them are from the Izmail region."