Latvian documentary producer Dzintra Geka will visit the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point on Wednesday, February 15, for a public screening of her latest film.

The screening will be held in Room 221 of the Noel Fine Arts Center beginning at 6 p.m., and is open to the public free of charge. The event is sponsored by the College of Fine Arts and Communication, the College of Letters and Science, the Department of Communication and the Department of History.

"Once There Was Siberia," Geka�s most recent film in the Siberia�s Children Film series, is a historical account of the fate of Latvian children who were deported by the Soviet Union, now Russia, on June 14, 1941. On that night, 15,000 alleged "enemies of the state" were rounded up and sent to Siberia in cattle cars. Almost 4,000 of the deportees were children under the age of 16. These people comprised more than one percent of the total population of Latvia.

The film is based on extensive interviews conducted in Latvia, the United States, and in Siberia, where some of the deportees still live. It premiered in Latvia on June 14, 2005, the 64^th anniversary of the first Soviet deportations. Her previous documentaries have won awards in Latvia and she was invited to participate at the 2002 Newport Beach Film Festival.

Geka�s personal history reflects the tragedy of her homeland. Her father was deported to Siberia after the Soviets re-conquered Latvia at the end of World War II. He escaped from a gulag and returned home, where he lived in hiding for four years. He was recaptured shortly after Geka�s birth in 1951 and returned to Siberia. She did not see him again until she was 17.

Geka studied cinematography and, after the fall of the Soviet Union, she worked for a time with Steven Spielberg�s SHOAH Fund, a project that compiles film records and produces documentaries about the Holocaust. The parallels between the experience of European Jews and the experience of Latvians convinced Geka of the need to tell the tragic stories of her homeland.

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