Documentary on Igor Kon wins Artdocfest prize ^{CEFR B1}

The documentary “Why I Swam Against the Current” received the best director prize at Artdocfest in March 2025. It was produced by the Berlin-based studio Narra and the independent journalist cooperative Bereg, and released on Meduza's YouTube channel.

Igor Kon was born in 1928 in Saint Petersburg and lived mostly with his mother; his father barely took part in his life. He survived evacuation during the Siege of Leningrad. At 15 he began studying history, first at a university in Chuvashiya and later in Saint Petersburg (then Leningrad) after his return. He worked in the social sciences while the field faced strong political limits in the Soviet Union, and he had job changes and periods of unemployment. Discrimination against people with Jewish origins sometimes limited his opportunities.

By the mid-1980s Kon became widely known as the first and for many years the only sexologist in the USSR. He appeared in the media, used foreign academic literature, and worked on public policy around AIDS as the epidemic reached the late USSR. He researched homosexuality in the 1990s and gender roles in the early 2000s. Kon died in 2011; his ashes were secretly buried in his mother's grave to prevent vandalism.