Providence, R.I.--Providence College will present the screening of a recently released documentary on the Soviet occupation of Lithuania on Wednesday, April 29, at 8:00 p.m. in the Angell Blackfriars Theatre of the Smith Center for the Arts on campus. The screening is open to the public at no charge.

A story about human and civil rights, Red Terror on the Amber Coast: Soviet Occupation--Lithuanian Resistance, 1939-1993 was produced by Rev. Kenneth R. Gumbert, O.P., PC associate professor of film studies in theatre arts, and producer/writer Rev. David O'Rourke, O.P. They are partners in Domedia Productions, a Rhode Island-based film production company.

Red Terror was released in fall 2008 and was shown locally for the first time in January on Rhode Island PBS station WSBE-TV, Channel 36.

The screening of the 60-minute documentary at PC will be followed by a question-and-answer session led by Father Gumbert. The event is sponsored by the College's Department of Theatre, Dance, and Film.

Red Terror documents the Soviet occupation of Lithuania, beginning with Stalin and his 1939 mutual non-aggression pact with Hitler. Through archival film, photographs, and interviews with survivors, it "tells the story of the tens of thousands of Lithuanians who were rounded up, arrested, and transported by cattle cars to slave labor camps, prisons, mines, and death camps in Siberia and elsewhere in the Soviet Union," said Father Gumbert, who noted that even women and children were sent to the camps.

Fathers Gumbert and O'Rourke traveled to Lithuania in 2006 and interviewed historians, former prisoners, slave-laborers, deportees, and resistance fighters who survived to describe what it was like to live under the Soviet rule of terror.

"For 50 years, the Lithuanian people were the prisoners of Soviet terror in their own country," said Father Gumbert. He added, "This is a story that, until now, has been largely unknown to many of us in the West."

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