Famous documentary filmmakers from Pridnestrovie

The Renewal Republican Party presented its project “My Great Countrymen” for the 15th time. It was dedicated this time to two famous names in the world of documentary cinema: Efim Uchitel and Philippe Pechul – documentary filmmakers from Pridnestrovie. The project was presented by Deputy of the Supreme Council of the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic Ilona Tyuryaeva. She is the ideological inspirer of this project, which searches for and finds talented people in various fields of science and art, who have become famous throughout the world. They all have one thing in common – they were born on Pridnestrovian land.

It is no accident that two well-known documentary cameramen are united. Efim Uchitel and Philip Pechul were friends from school and went together on the basis of Komsomol voucher to study camera art in Leningrad.

Philip Pechul was born in the village of Tashlyk, Grigoriopol district. He was a talented and inquisitive boy who found it easy to study. His parents decided that he needed to study in Tiraspol. So he ended up in the class where Efim Uchitel studied. They sat at the same desk together, took up photography, loved cinema, and together they went to study in Leningrad. Pechul began working as a cameraman for the Soviet-Finnish company. His footage can be seen in the film “The Mannerheim Line”. It was for this work that he was awarded the Stalin Prize, the first from Soviet Moldova. He again put on a military uniform and went to the front having previously served the required two years of military service in the army in 1941. He died in battle on the Karelian Isthmus in November of the same year.

Efim Uchitel filmed school graduations in June 1941, and he picked up the camera again in the morning after the announcement of the attack of Nazi Germany on the Soviet Union. One of his famous shots is a long panorama of the faces of those who volunteer for the front. Efim Uchitel survived the entire siege of Leningrad, from the first to the last day, shooting kilometers of film. Its footage was shown at the Nuremberg trials as evidence of Nazi crimes against humanity. Both documentary cameramen went down in the history of Soviet cinema.

Relatives of the famous cameraman Efim Uchitel, who passed away in 1988, came to Tiraspol in 2013. His son, director Alexey Efimovich Uchitel, and grandson Ilya Uchitel, who continues his grandfather’s work and also works as a cameraman in documentary films. They were shown Chapel Street, today's Rosa Luxemburg Street, where Yefim Uchitel once lived. The famous director considers that Tiraspol is a special place for their family.