Production of a Multimedia Longread on the Cultural Experience of Repression in Abkhazia (Creative Format)

The project is dedicated to repressions in Abkhazia. As the basis of the material, I interviewed the real victim of repressions in Abkhazia, Nana Kacharava (Semirdzhieva), and text memoirs of Adile Abbas-Ogly, which portray a similar experience with Nana. In the interview, Nana recalls the execution of her family members, her mother's imprisonment and the experience of restrictions and condemnation from society due to the status of a member of the repressed family. The main objective of this graduation project is to compose a multimedia material - a longread «You Can't Understand», dedicated to the stories of victims of repression. The main tasks that the graduation project performs are enlarging attention to the selected traumatic experience and similar, searching non-traumatic ways to talk about this experience, and considering the events as cultural facts in the present. The graduation project led to the following results: according to the selected format, determine the correct form of handling memory in a specific case chosen; study the specifics of the longread format; the unique media project. Apart from that, the graduation project performs several functions. Firstly, it aims for drawing the attention of researchers to what happened during the period of Soviet repressions in remote regions. Secondly, the goal was to search for the correct language for talking about this traumatic experience both in Abkhazia and beyond its borders. Also, it seems to be of great importance to launch a conversation about these events as cultural facts of the population's life, consider the problems with the help of modern theoretical approaches, stop being silent, and start rethinking this experience least painfully. From my perspective, this work is significant precisely for the people of post-Soviet media space.