Meet the Team
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER
VICTORINA PETROSSIANTS
Victorina Petrossiants was born in Moscow, Russia and graduated from the history department at Moscow University. Petrossiants went on to become an art critic and curated major international exhibitions of Russian and Soviet art in Turin, Italy, and Helsinki, Finland. In 1993 she immigrated to the United States. In 2012, she became the founder and general producer of the VIKO TV Company, a production company that has since produced more than 150 documentaries, TV series, and didactic programs. She has been the main producer on those projects, having contributed meaningful analysis and reporting on art institutions and their collections, exhibitions, and museum directors, as well as unreported world historical events, and many other topics in between. In fact, her work continues to assess the central relationship between culture and society through a sharp documentarian eye.
Since 2018, Victorina Petrossiants and her company VIKO has been one of the driving forces behind the Pinacoteca di Brera's innovative online platform www.breraplus.org . In particular, she has helped develop a new format for online documentaries, which allow users to explore additional content during the presentation. The excellence of her production skills and those of her team have helped the Pinacoteca di Brera to become recognised as one of Italy's leading cultural websites.
DIRECTOR
ELENA YAKOVICH
Elena Yakovich was born in Moscow, Russia, where she graduated from the journalism department at Moscow State University. She successfully worked as a journalist for one of the leading Russian newspapers, Literaturnaya Gazeta. Since 1993 she has been engaged in the production of television documentaries for major TV stations. During that time, she created more than 100 movies and TV shows and has won nine awards at different Film Festivals in different categories. Yakovich is one of the few women documentary filmmakers in Russia and is one of the few who has worked to document the Holocaust in film.
A key methodology of her documentary practice, for which she is well known, is to visit the locales which her films historicize, sites where significant events happened. In the process, she has cultivated a striking talent to create unforgettable stories about the events for contemporary viewers.
“I could not pass on the opportunity to help tell this beautiful and tragic story. It is about Moses Beregovsky, a man who saved and preserved the musical heritage of the Jews of Ukraine. Before World War II, he was the only one who carried out such a project by collecting so much music and writing about it. To our knowledge there was no one similar in Poland, where most Jews lived, nor in Belarus, nor in many other countries.
Therefore, the work of Beregovsky became a monument not only to the Jews of Ukraine, where he worked, but to the entire East European Jewry.
With the film crew, we followed him through the villages of Ukraine. Villages where Jewish life was once in full swing. Now, so many decades later, the voices of thousands of women, children, old people, who were shot by the Nazis, haunt the empty houses.For these, and many other reasons, the story in this film adds texture and voice to the archive of Jewish life in Europe, one that must be remembered”
ELENA YAKOVICH
DIRECTOR
PRODUCER
NATALIE AZAROV
Natalie Azarov was born in Moscow, Russia. She is a graduate of the Moscow State University of Culture. In 1993, Natalie immigrated with her husband and two children to the United States of America. Settling in New York City, Natalie has worked for more than 25 years in the event planning industry.
In October 2019, Natalie joined Victorina Petrossiants as a line
producer for the movie "Song Searcher". She is dedicated to promoting this documentary film, introducing the world to the story of the vanished Yiddish culture and its music.
Since 2020 Natalie Azarov works as a line producer on the documentary film, "The Making of Living Drugs".
Contact us.
songsearcherinc@gmail.com
Phone: 917.838.6602
New York, New York
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