ECG Productions

12/28/2025

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

May these days bring quiet, warmth, and a sense of support among those closest to you.
May the coming year bring more peace, mutual respect, and human solidarity — the things without which neither work, nor life, nor the future are possible.

Thank you to everyone who was with us this year.
With hope and gratitude, we move forward.

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

12/28/2025

The opportunity to continue our work also allows us to continue helping.

Below is a brief report on our ongoing support for Ukraine.
Transparency and accountability remain essential to us.

Full report:
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1A8CbnZhNs/

12/28/2025

All or Nothing: Assiatou’s Path to Canada

Assiatou Madina Diallo is a Toronto-based entrepreneur, mother, and outspoken feminist whose life journey began in Guinea, a small country in West Africa.

Behind her open smile and natural confidence lies a past marked by hardship, loss, and difficult choices. Despite many unfortunate and even tragic events in her life, Assiatou never abandoned her belief that she could become the best of the best. For her, life was never about compromise — it was always all or nothing.

This film is an intimate portrait of resilience, ambition, and inner strength. It tells the story of a woman who refused to be defined by trauma, geography, or expectations, and instead chose to build her own future in a new country.

The film is produced by ECG Productions and is one of the works from our archive that we are now making freely available on our YouTube channel. It is part of a ten-part documentary project dedicated to the stories of immigrant women in Canada — women who rebuilt their lives far from their countries of origin and shaped a new sense of home.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cv2cQXo156s

TEGS: Assiatou Madina Diallo, immigrant women in Canada, African women in Canada, immigrant stories, feminist stories, African diaspora, Guinea, West Africa, Toronto documentary, Canadian documentary, documentary film, women documentary, migration stories, resilience, ECG Productions, ECGProductions, Marina Dessiatkina documentary, women in Canada series

Assiatou Madina Diallo is a Toronto-based entrepreneur, mother, and outspoken feminist whose life journey began in Guinea, a small country in West Africa.Beh...

12/20/2025

📣 From Selection to Finalist — and Now… Vegas Awaits! 🎬⚡

https://vimeo.com/1074001360/0c0ce1b2e4

Our film The Electric City: Nikola Tesla in Canada has just reached the final round at the Nikola Tesla Film Festival
in Las Vegas! 🎉

📍 Brenden Theatres, Palms Casino, Las Vegas, Nevada
🗓 January 7th — Stay tuned! We might even take home the Grand Prix…

This documentary started its journey as a simple official selection. Then it became a quarterfinalist, rose to semifinalist, then finalist — and now it's heading to the big screen in Vegas.

🔌 About the Film:
Prepare to be electrified by a groundbreaking documentary that uncovers a hidden chapter in the life of Nikola Tesla. Did Tesla ever set foot in Canada? How did his legacy shape the country’s power grid? What really happened with the Niagara Falls hydro project?

Through rare archives, stunning photographs, and expert insight, Electric City separates myth from truth — and asks a bold question: how many times did Tesla visit Canada... if at all?

🎥 Premiered on the 170th anniversary of Tesla’s birth, this film is a tribute to one of the world’s greatest visionaries — and the mysteries he left behind.

💫 Congratulations to
Anatoliy Mateshko,
Maxim Kravchinsky,
Artem Borodin,
Tim Kachurov,
Gregory Antimony,
Felix Golubev,
and the entire ECGProductions team —
for the incredible work and well-deserved recognition!

12/19/2025

🎥 An Hour of Interview | Sergei Grankin
Host: Gregory Antimony

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XO85vu7kwTQ

In this episode of An Hour of Interview, Gregory Antimony speaks with Sergei Grankin, a military correspondent for Israel’s Channel 9.

A wide-ranging conversation about how reality changed after October 7, how Israel achieved not only a military but also a psychological victory, the role of Donald Trump, Israel–Ukraine relations, propaganda, censorship, and the power of truth.

Sergei Grankin shares his personal experience from the front line — thousands of live broadcasts during the war, the deletion of his million-subscriber YouTube channel, and why Israel, despite battlefield success, continues to lose the information war.

In dialogue with Gregory Antimony, the discussion turns to alliances and ruptures, moral dilemmas, and the profound transformations reshaping the Middle East.

📍 Recorded in Toronto, 2025
📺 Produced by ECG Productions / Gregory Antimony Show – “An Hour of Interview”

#ЧасИнтервью #ГригорийАнтимони #СергейГранкин #Израиль #БлижнийВосток #7Октября #ХАМАС #ВойнаВИзраиле #ИнформационнаяВойна #Цензура #ДональдТрамп #Нетаньяху #ИзраильУкраина #ВоенныйКорреспондент #Журналистика #Газа

Подписывайтесь на наш канал - https://www.youtube.com/ канал ECG Productions - https://www.youtube.com/

12/19/2025

Voiceover Recording for the Film
We have completed another important stage of work on the film Virsky: Dance of Resilience.
The voiceover brings together seven key fragments from the life of Pavlo Virsky: pre-revolutionary Odesa, family and ballet school; the 1930s and the death of his brother; the creation of the Dance Ensemble as a Soviet showcase; surveillance by the KGB and American intelligence during international tours; the encounter with Otto Skorzeny — and Virsky’s early death.
This was a difficult task not because the text is complex, but because it required absolute precision of tone. Together with actor Anatolii Mateshko and sound designer Miroslav Delev, we searched for how it should sound — not to emphasize, not to press, not to perform, but to allow the words to be heard.
When speaking about Pavlo Virsky’s life — repression, silence, fear, loss — any excess emotion sounds false. What matters here is not the strength of the voice, but restraint: not telling the viewer what to feel, but letting the story speak for itself. We stopped many times, rewrote phrases, listened carefully to the pauses between words — because sometimes a pause speaks more truthfully than text.
This voiceover is not commentary. It is a way of being present beside a man who lived his entire life between the stage and silence. There is pain in this story, but there is also something that endured. Ukraine — preserved not through declarations, but through movement, rhythm, and the body itself. Through dance, as a form of memory.
Work on the film continues.

11/23/2025

Holodomor Commemoration in Toronto

The Holodomor was a deliberate crime.
The Soviet regime seized grain, searched homes, and swept food even from children’s bowls.
Villages were sealed off. Roads were blocked. People trying to find food were shot.
Ukraine was forced into silence — and millions died in that silence.

Today, standing by the Holodomor Memorial in Toronto, it is impossible not to see how history repeats itself.
Russia is once again trying to destroy Ukraine.
Once again destroying cities, bombing homes, killing children.
Once again trying to take away the right to life, freedom, language, culture — the very same things it tried to erase in 1932–1933.

That is why the Holodomor is not only a tragedy of the past.
It is an unbroken line of evil, which has changed its form — but not its intention.

On November 22, 2025, thousands of people gathered in Toronto to honor the victims of the Holodomor.
Representatives of the federal and provincial parliaments, the city government, clergy, and the Ukrainian community bowed their heads together before a tragedy the world must never forget.

Among the voices heard at the ceremony was Mykola Latyshko — a Holodomor survivor born in 1927 in the Kherson region.
His words continue to remind us of a truth the Soviet regime tried to erase forever.

The memory of the Holodomor lives on in Canada —
in the voices of survivors,
in the young people who carry this history forward,
in the community that refuses to let this truth fade.

We remember.
We speak.
We honor.

#Голодомор

11/23/2025

Today we want to remind you of this story again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-NslGOXq0k

This is the testimony of Valentyna Vlasenko about the Holodomor.
About her grandfather, Sydir Letuchy, who was deprived of everything — his land, his livestock, his right to live.
He lay down on the wooden loft, put a handful of straw under himself — and never got up again.

This is not fiction. This is not a metaphor.
It is the voice of a Ukrainian woman who preserves the memory of her grandfather — and of the millions who were destroyed by the system.

People often say: these were just the “splinters” of industrialization. That the famine was not only in Ukraine.
Yes, there was famine in 1921 and in 1946 as well. But in 1921 the whole world was helping Russia, and the famine was not concealed.
In 1933 in Ukraine it was different: the famine was deliberately silenced, villages were blocked, people were not allowed to leave — and these measures were not applied in the same way to the famine-stricken regions of Russia.

In Ukraine, it was necessary to deliberately crush resistance to collectivization.
In 1930, 4,098 peasant uprisings were recorded here — around 956,000 participants.
Peasants protested against total collectivization, dekulakization, grain requisitions, the closure of churches, against a regime that took everything down to the last grain.

The Holodomor of 1932–1933 became the decisive instrument to suppress this resistance.
The story of grandfather Sydir Letuchy is only one of countless such stories.

These photos are from the Holodomor exhibition that took place in Toronto at the St. Volodymyr Institute from October 28 to November 22, 2025.


#Голодомор

11/14/2025

https://ecgproductions.ca/transforming-anger-into-art-inside-from-violence-to-violins/

Transforming Anger into Art — Inside From Violence to Violins https://ecgproductions.ca/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/hammer_band1.jpg 768 1024 ECG Productions ECG Productions https://ecgproductions.ca/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/hammer_band1.jpg November 13, 2025 November 13, 2025 November 13, 2025 n...

11/03/2025

🕯️ In Memory of Ida Shchupak

The stories of people whose lives were touched by the Gulag system were among the first we began to record when we started work on the project “GULAG. Witnesses.”
The story of Ida Shchupak was one of the very first — and perhaps one of the most moving.

Sometimes memory lives in objects — in a photograph, a line in a letter, or a painting made by someone who shared your pain and your faith.
Ida’s story is one of those.
She carried through her life not only the sorrow for her father, a Gulag prisoner, but also the love he left her — a love stronger than fear, hunger, the camps, and years of silence.

Born in Bobruisk, Ida lived through evacuation, Siberia, cold, and famine.
As a child, she was afraid to say aloud that her father was an “enemy of the people.”
Her father, Mikhail Naftolin, was a frontline soldier, wounded near Bryansk, later captured, and then arrested and sentenced under Article 58.

In the camp, surrounded by cold and despair, he asked a fellow prisoner — an artist — to paint a portrait of his little daughter from a photograph.
In the lower corner, he wrote: “To my dear little daughter Idachka, from your loving daddy. Uglich.”
When the portrait finally reached Ida, she carefully painted over the word “Uglich” with oil paint — so that no one would know where her father had been.
She carried that portrait through her entire life — from Bobruisk to Zaporizhzhia, and later to Canada.
It stood in her home among other things that preserved his memory.

Years later, in Canada, Ida began creating her own art — delicate pictures made from fish bones.
She used to say that each bone was like a human life: fragile, transparent, but when joined together — something living and beautiful could emerge.
She gave one of those shimmering, pearly, almost weightless artworks to each member of our filming crew.
One of them stands in our home today.
As a reminder of her.

A few days ago, Ida passed away.
I remember her voice, her eyes, her hands.
We send our deepest condolences to her sons — our friend, Ukrainian historian Ihor Shchupak, and his brother Yuriy.
The bright memory of their mother is not only a part of their family’s story.
It is part of all of ours.

🎞️ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsaHzScuSZ0

🌐 English version: gulagshadows.com/ida-shchupak

🌐 Ukrainian version: gulagshadows.com/uk/ida-shchupak

📜 Project website: gulagshadows.com

11/02/2025

🕊️ “Hour of Interview” with Gregory Antimony | Oleksandr Borodulya — The Soul of Ukrainian Dance

Recorded by our company in Toronto, this program is an open conversation with Oleksandr Borodulya, former soloist of the Virsky Ukrainian National Folk Dance Ensemble.
The interview is in Russian — as a form of counter-propaganda, with a fragile yet sincere hope to reach those who still live within Soviet myths and cannot grasp what the real Ukraine is.

🎥 In this conversation — the stage and the tours, the war with Russia, the people who refused to break, and Ukrainian dance as the soul of the nation, which can never be conquered.

We prepared transcripts in Ukrainian and English so that this voice — and the strength it carries — can be heard both in Ukraine and beyond its borders.

🔗 Watch the program:
👉 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgdE8tRPacQ&t=1s

📖 Ukrainian transcript:
👉 gregoryantimony.com/ru/oleksandr-borodulya

📖 English transcript:
👉 gregoryantimony.com/oleksandr-borodulya

11/02/2025

🕯️ The Return of Names — Memory Spoken Aloud

The annual “Return of Names” event takes place on the eve of Political Prisoner Day — October 30.
On this day in 1974, prisoners in the Mordovia and Perm labor camps declared a hunger strike to protest political repression in the USSR.

In Toronto, the action organized by Memorial has been held for many years near the Raoul Wallenberg Monument — dedicated to the Swedish diplomat who saved tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews during World War II and became a symbol of moral courage and human solidarity.

🕯️ Decades later, political prisoners still exist in Russia, and many are again forced to go on hunger strikes as one of the few remaining ways to draw attention to unbearable conditions and injustice.
Since September 25, 2025, human rights activist Mikhail Kriger has been on a hunger strike, protesting constant harassment — repeated solitary confinement on fabricated charges and deprivation of correspondence.

This year, participants of the action read aloud 1,506 names, 22 messages from today’s Russian political prisoners, and 12 names of people they personally wished to remember.
Thanks to volunteers and human rights defenders, the event took place in 95 cities across 37 countries.

🎞️ Recently, Memorial presented the animated short “My Dear Ones, I’m Writing to You From…”, created by the creative group East Pond.
It tells the story of letters that helped people survive in the GULAG and was made for the traveling exhibition “The Right to Correspondence.”
Based on archival materials from Memorial and the book of the same name, the film focuses not so much on the hardships of imprisonment as on the tiny spark of hope that came from staying connected to the outside world.

📩 Letters helped people survive then — and they can still do so today.
Writing to a prisoner, offering support, and sharing news is a way to keep silence from winning.

Watch the film on Memorial’s YouTube channel:
👉 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZw5W8xfhfo