Elena Pogrebizhskaia

In 2007, Pogrebizhskaya announced an end to her music career and emerged as a film director. Her films Blood Trader and Doctor Liza received TEFI awards in 2008 and 2009 for Best Russian Documentary Film. In 2011, Pogrebizhskaya founded her own cinema studio 'Partizanets'. She made a series of documentaries dedicated to psychological disorders. The first film was titled 'Me and My Neurosis'. Pogrebizhskaya suffered from this condition since 2004 and it took her 2.5 years to heal. The money for the films were collected by crowdfunding. The next film was dedicated to posttraumatic syndrome. In 2017, she made a movie 'Fat and Slim', dedicated to people with eating disorders. Released in 2013, her film 'Mama, I'll kill you' got Amnesty International prize at the Film Festival in Pesaro in 2014, as well as awards of the Black Maria, Jersey, and NorCal Film Festivals. The documentary shows lives of three children, Alexander, Nastya and Alexey, in an orphan boarding school in Moscow region. The movie got a wide response, even on a governmental level because it showed dramatic lives of orphans in asylum, while all the adults thought it were the best possible place for the children. Eventually, the film became one of the factors that led to a legislative reform related to the rights of the child and overall orphanage care system in Russia. In 2020, Pogrebizhskaya made a sequel, 'Mama, I'll Kill You 2', that showed the same characters 7 years later. After the reform, kids were taken into foster families and their old orphanage was closed. In 2014, she received the Grand Prix of the Internet Media Awards. In 2017, she released a film Andreeva Case about a power-lifting champion Tatiana Andreeva, who stabbed a man for harassing her, after which she got 6 years of prison for murder. Pogrebizhskaya showed in her movie all inconsistencies of investigation, confessions and statements of witnesses. Pogrebizhskaya currently hosts a “Cinema Club with Elena Pogrebizhskaya” at the Moscow Tolerance Centre. In one of her interviews, Pogrebizhskaya stated that: “Film is the surest means of conveying emotions. Through cinema, the problems of another become fully understandable to anyone who sits in the audience. This is better than any speech or exhortation.” The discussions that Pogrebizhskaya holds after the film showings strengthen this effect manifold. In 2018, she launched an online cinema club called Psychologies. Elena's main place of work since 2021 is her YouTube channel "Films of Elena Pogrebizhskaya". There are almost two million subscribers there now.