Why Ukrainian perspectives on cinema matter

After two years of online events due to the pandemic, Victoria Leshchenko and Yuliia Kovalenko and their team of organizers were looking forward to finally celebrating the Docudays UA International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival in person.

But then, just as they were completing the planning of their festival, to be held on March 25 to April 3, Russia invaded Ukraine. It has since been postponed indefinitely. “This is a painful story for us,” festival programmer Kovalenko told DW through a video call from Odesa.

Kovalenko stayed in the country with her parents, while Leshchenko, the festival’s program director, managed to flee to Berlin. Even though their lives were disrupted by war, they pursued their mission of promoting Ukrainian cinema by establishing a film curators’ initiative, called sloїk film atelier.

Film curators Yuliia Kovalenko and Vitoriia Leshchenko

Collaborating with the two curators, the Berlin-based Deutsche Kinemathek is now releasing a special program called “Perspectives of Ukrainian Cinema.”

From June 12-30, cinemas in Berlin, Hamburg and Leipzig will be screening — free of charge — an eclectic selection of Ukrainian films, accompanied by discussions with filmmakers and experts.

“We don’t know as much as we should know about Ukrainian culture, society and history,” said Rainer Rother, artistic director of the Deutsche Kinemathek at a presentation of the film series. By screening these films, the German film archive aims to increase people’s awareness that “Ukraine has a culture of its own — as we know, Russian propaganda denies the existence of Ukrainian culture,” he added.

This idea was also echoed by Germany’s Commissioner for Culture and the Media, Claudia Roth, during her official visit to Odesa on Tuesday: “This war is also a war against culture,” she said, noting that after more than 100 days of war, 375 cultural institutions and 137 churches have been destroyed or damaged. “This clearly shows: It is about attacking the cultural identity of Ukraine,” she added.

• 6 recent films showcasing Ukraine’s culture

  ‘Atlantis’ (2019)

  The films in the series “Perspectives of Ukrainian Cinema” are a reminder that the war in Ukraine didn’t only start in 2022. Many works address the conflict that began in 2014 in eastern Ukraine. Set in 2025, Valentyn Vasyanovych’s anticipation film suddenly feels prescient, as it portrays the aftermath of a land in ruins, with former soldiers dealing with PTSD while exhuming war corpses.

• 6 recent films showcasing Ukraine’s culture

  ‘Klondike’ (2022)

  Maryna Er Gorbach’s drama is set in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, near the Russian border, where a couple is expecting their first child. But following the shooting of the MH17 flight, war erupts in the Donbas and their house gets bombed. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and won the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury at the Berlinale.

• 6 recent films showcasing Ukraine’s culture

  ‘War Note’ (2020)

  This documentary features a kaleidoscope of personal videos filmed by Ukrainian soldiers on the front line of the war with Russia. Their raw footage conveys the feeling that their lives might end at any moment. The work by director Roman Liubiy is also a reflection on the challenges of portraying the traumatic experience of war in film.

• 6 recent films showcasing Ukraine’s culture

  ‘The Earth is Blue as an Orange’ (2020)

  This documentary, directed by Iryna Tsilyk, focuses on a single mother and her four children living in the war zone of Donbas in Ukraine. But while their world is turned upside down by bombings, the family shoots a movie about their experience, turning the document into an extraordinary tribute to the power of cinema in times of disaster.

• 6 recent films showcasing Ukraine’s culture

  ‘Volcano’ (2018)

  An interpreter gets lost in the southern Ukrainian steppe during an inspection tour of military checkpoints near the Crimean border. Roman Bondarchuk’s film is actually a weird road trip playing on social absurdity and magic realism. A “Moviegram” critic described the work as “the most Ukrainian film in recent years.”

• 6 recent films showcasing Ukraine’s culture

  ‘My Thoughts Are Silent’ (2019)

  Antonio Lukich’s comedy-drama centers on a lanky 22-year-old trying to build his career as a sound engineer. An unusual recording assignment in Transcarpathia could be his ticket out of Ukraine to a more attractive life in Canada. But annoyingly, his mother joins him in his endeavor. A humorous reflection on identity and mother-son relations, “My Thoughts Are Silent” won several festival awards.

  Author: Elizabeth Grenier

Greetings from Ukraine’s oldest film studio

At the press presentation of the series “Perspectives of Ukrainian Cinema,” co-curator Yuliia Kovalenko sent a video message filmed in front of the Odesa Film Studio. Her choice of location was not random.

The film studio, which officially celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2019, stands for Ukraine’s longstanding filmmaking tradition.

But recently, on May 18, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said that Russia considers the film studio a “military facility” and a likely target for a missile strike.

The fact that Russia is threatening to destroy this cultural symbol reawakens painful memories, as Ukraine’s flourishing filmmaking scene was already suppressed by the totalitarian Soviet regime in the past century.

Ukraine’s long history of filmmaking

Ukrainians are proud of their cinematic tradition. As Kovalenko pointed out, the inhabitants of Odesa see their city as the home of the invention of the world’s first movie camera: Inventor Joseph Timchenko held a screening of films shot with his own apparatus in 1894 — two years before the Lumiere brothers’ first projection, which went down in history as the birth of cinema. Timchenko, however, never patented his design.

The state-led Odesa Film Studio was officially founded in 1919, on the remnants of private cinema studios held by Myron Grossman and other producers.

Initially managed by a state agency called the All-Ukrainian Photo Cinema Administration, “for the first 10 years it was still possible to work independently from Moscow,” explained Kovalenko. It was the golden era of Ukrainian cinema, and Odesa was seen as “the Ukrainian Hollywood,” said the film critic.

The Odesa Film Studio is more than a century old

But then, starting in the 1930s, the studio fell under Moscow’s control, with many creators fleeing as they faced political prosecution.

“It was a dark period of terror against intellectuals and simple citizens,” said Kovalenko, recalling the fate of major filmmakers and screenwriters.

Among them was Les Kurbas, who is seen as one of the most important Ukrainian theater directors of the 20th century. He was executed in 1937, among the estimated 700,000 to 1.2 million killed during Joseph Stalin’s campaign to solidify his power from August 1936 to March 1938.

Another notable name is Isaac Babel, a screenwriter and author whose books have been translated into several languages, including his “Odessa Stories.” Having traveled around Ukraine in the early 1930s, he witnessed the USSR’s brutal collectivization process and Stalin’s deliberate famine of 1932-33, the Holodomor, which killed an estimated 4 million Ukrainians. Babel was arrested in 1939 and, according to Soviet authorities, died in a Siberian gulag camp in 1941; his family presumes he was executed soon after his arrest.

Revisiting Oleksandr Dovzhenko’s ‘Arsenal’

“Perspectives of Ukrainian Cinema” opens with a film classic by Oleksandr Dovzhenko, who managed to keep working during that period since he supported communist ideals. “But despite his communist beliefs, he didn’t try to produce agitprop films,” Kovalenko pointed out.

An expressionist masterpiece: ‘Arsenal’ by Oleksandr Dovzhenko

Dovzhenko’s 1929 avant-garde expressionist film, “Arsenal,” portraying the 1918 uprising of workers in the Kyiv factory of the same name, avoids tracing clear ideological lines and evokes wartime absurdities, which could be interpreted as questioning the morality of violent revolution: “It is really interesting to analyze and rethink the film today,” said Kovalenko.

A new generation of Ukrainian filmmakers

All the other films in the “Perspectives of Ukrainian Cinema” series are recent works, directed in the past five years.

Ukrainian cinema has been experiencing a revival over the past decade, boosted by a strong documentary filmmaking scene. From there, many moved on to directing fiction, pointed out Victoriia Leshchenko at the press presentation of the program.

This new generation of directors carry the torch of the country’s rich cinematic legacy. Their works not only showcase a broad palette of genres, pointed out Leshchenko, many films also bear witness to the fact that the war sadly didn’t start in 2022.

Edited by: Louisa Schaefer

Article source: https://www.dw.com/en/why-ukrainian-perspectives-on-cinema-matter/a-62074824?maca=en-rss-en-all-1573-rdf