How the cinema of Ukraine survives, while Russia targets its culture

Ukrainian article of the week published in the 48h edition of the "What about Ukraine" newsletter on October 3rd, 2024. The article was written by Daria Bezruchenko for The Ukrainians and was translated for n-ost by Natalia Volynets.

Every year, on the second Saturday of September, Ukraine honours the Day of Ukrainian Cinema. This is the heritage which brought us auteurs such as Sergei Paradjanov, who lived and filmed in Ukraine, and was imprisoned by the Soviet regime, and Ukrainian pioneer film-maker Oleksandr Dovzhenko, who rewrote his scripts to conform to censorship. In the last years, this cinema also brought the country an Oscar for documenting Russians crimes in Mariupol so that finally the world could not avert its eyes from atrocity.

We spoke with three Ukrainian film directors about how our cinema has developed since the times of Soviet censorship, whether there is a place for an artistic tradition when the continuity of generations is constantly broken by Russia, how to teach the Ukrainian audience to watch Ukrainian movies, and whether it is possible to create feature films during the full-scale war.

Volodymyr Tykhyi, film director, screenwriter, producer. Co-author of the projects ‘Assholes. Arabesques’, ‘Ukraine, goodbye!’ and ‘Babylon’13’, director of the film Independence Day

“My first experience with Ukrainian cinema was the director Sergei Paradjanov. I grew up in the west of Ukraine, near the Polish border. At that time, Paradjanov was in prison, while Polish television [which we could pick up] was showing his film Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors at night, with a preliminary commentary. They didn’t dub it, just added subtitles. It was kind of a mystical discovery — I suddenly saw there was a movie about Ukraine, and it was fantastic. At that time, aged 11–12, I hadn’t seen anything like that. Now I realise that Polish television was making a gesture of solidarity with the repressed Paradjanov and, perhaps, with Ukraine.

We are now building a new cultural context, or, more precisely, a true, Ukrainian — rather than totalitarian or post-totalitarian — one. The names of Dovzhenko and Paradjanov acquire new meanings and insights, and their works are viewed as sincere and interesting documents of a particular era.

However, now Ukrainian director Philip Sotnychenko’s latest film La Palisade (2023) will tell us more than all the Dovzhenko studio’s movies of the 1960s and 1970s, as times are changing. You can’t watch ten Ukrainian films and feel confident that you understand everything about our cinema — this might have been the case 30 years ago, when every new movie was an event.

Today, digital technologies have allowed us to create the past using AI. In ten years’ time, it will be possible to reconstruct historical events, using documentary materials. Unfortunately, today we face a crisis of technological production in Ukraine: it’s simply absent. Previously, it was standing on its feet thanks to the more or less stable financial support from the state. Our cinema was kind of searching for itself, but now this is lost. When these processes work, we can see results, such as in Poland: they have their own Polish Netflix — this is, in a good sense, Polish production with its own audience. We, in contrast, are working to restore our continuity.

Herewith, we are part of the global context. Our documentaries are very important abroad. Even if they do not succeed at festivals, they get noticed. Our documentaries will help to make the next James Bond movie. Perhaps, this is not about being as strong an actor [in the global industry] as we’d like to be, but we still act.

We should be stubborn, and hold onto the memory of everything we’ve lost. Quality always wins and scales up; hence, it’s worth making prime cultural projects that will promote new contexts, which we really need and which will later expand into something popular for the viewers and represent us worldwide.

Of course, making films during war is traumatic. Directors, crew and actors have followed the European and American models of film-making. However, Ukraine is a rather unstable country, and we need to realise that what is happening to us is unique, it is not routine. In our case, we always have an opportunity to win an Oscar — if we document history, like Mstyslav Chernov with his 20 Days in Mariupol.

Obviously, we cannot speak about making feature films in Ukraine now. There is currently a global crisis facing these movies. Even 30–40 years ago, creative risk was a must for success — but now, it is absent, while true cinema relies on a certain degree of hooliganism, social and cultural. That is why we repeatedly return to documentaries, where you can’t ignore reality, as is the case in feature films. This fosters experimentation.

We make films from what we have at hand. At [the Ukrainian documentary filmmakers' association] Babylon'13, our budget limit is very low, so young blood constantly joins in. Currently, for example, we have many women, because almost all the men have mobilised. It is from these constant changes, in these unstable conditions, that we generate new approaches.”

Dmytro Suholytkyy-Sobchuk, film director and screenwriter, Pamfir movie author

“I’m 41, a bit older than our country. I still managed to grow up in an echo of socialist realism: there was a portrait of Lenin on my alphabet book. When I was eight or nine years old, my parents told me that my great-grandmother was sent to the camps for trying to collect wheat from the field. Aged eight, I proudly wore a trident rather than a Little Octobrist badge. This was how I first realised who I was and in which country I lived.

At school, we were taken to the cinema to watch American movies. When I was studying, I watched Ukrainian pictures shown on TV in the afternoon. It was then that I discovered for the first time that movies could show not just cowboys and distant worlds, but also us and our lives. Later, Soviet classics began to dominate the TV. I still believe that by showing plain Soviet comedies to children, they can understand about agitprop movies and propaganda and how various types of peoples are depicted, such as Evenings on a Farm near Dykanka, Wedding in Malinovka and Dovbush. These pictures should be watched with film directors and critics who will be able to tell an audience how and why they were made.

Ukrainian movies were often shelved, as they were unable to satisfy the censors. Film studio directors were appointed by Moscow. A Soviet debut film-maker could shoot on three topics: virgin land development, collective farms and WWII. Every artist faced a tough totalitarian vice. We remember Aleksandr Askoldov, who made only one movie, The Commissar, in 1967 [which was set in Ukraine and banned for 20 years] and was thrown out of the profession by the Soviet authorities. Or look at Ukrainian director Kira Muratova’s Long Farewells (1971), which mocked the reality of the USSR. Ukraine actually had several masters who could have become important names in Ukrainian cinema, such as Kira Muratova, Yuriy Ilyenko and Roman Balayan.

With the digital revolution enabling everyone to shoot a film, we enter the global context via debut film-makers offering something radically new, and then wait for their further pictures to make sure that these particular artists can maturely and consciously speak on various topics with deep artistic understanding.

I feel that currently, there is a much more diverse choice of film-makers than even ten years ago, such as Roman Bondarchuk, Kateryna Gornostai and Philip Sotnychenko. So now take your seats in the auditorium and watch who among us, film directors of the first such generation, will become artists that can make an impact.”

Marysia Nikitiuk, screenwriter and director. Worked on the ‘Ukraine, goodbye!’ project and such movies as When the Trees Fall and Lucky Girl

“My involvement in filmmaking began in 2012 with the laboratory ‘Ukraine, goodbye!’ There we, screenwriters and playwrights, spent a year working on the Almanac of Ukrainian Short Films, devoted to the issue of Ukrainians’ emigration. This was a full-fledged laboratory, which happened thanks to the State Film Agency fund being re-launched in 2011 and starting to function properly. It became autonomous from the Ministry of Culture and began to work based on the European model, supporting national film projects. That’s a popular practice in Europe, so it was a great example of us not reinventing the wheel, but taking advantage of something already in place. Ukraine does not fall under, for example, the American or Indian model, where the domestic market is huge. Ours is a small, almost non-existent market, and people are not used to watching movies. Hence, our cinematographers work like in Europe — the national film fund protects internal producers who can create their own narratives.

Since 2011, Ukraine has strongly supported full-length and short debut movies. It was not quite a state help, but rather a state policy of non-interference, and that was fine. Writing scripts and looking for funding is a very long process, which takes at least three years. And when you start it, it is very expensive to stop the production if you have to. Our films have begun to enter ‘Class A’ festivals. This was a big breakthrough — after everything our cinema’s faced since the 1990s.

Tonia Noyabrova has a nice movie Do You Love Me? about that period. There, the father of the main heroine loses his job at the Dovzhenko Film Studio after Ukraine gains independence. At that time, we moved from the Soviet system to an apparently free market. Still, the cinematography market did not exist as such, and no one managed cultural policy. Hence, almost no films were shot during the 90s. I remember coming to cinemas and movie houses with my parents, and we found markets for underwear and Belarusian textiles, as the cinema owners had rented out the premises just to survive. It’s funny now, but huge cultural disasters are happening regularly in our country.

However, the thing is that if we don’t tell our own stories, others will tell theirs about us.

Take, for instance, the awful Russian films, such as Taras Bulba (2009), which make you only laugh and make your eyes bleed — not to mention the image of a Ukrainian in modern Russian cinema, as someone stupid and funny, or a swindler, straight out of the KGB playback on how to stereotype other, non-Russian, peoples. So, if we don’t take care of ourselves, others will take care of us, occupying the empty space and filling the vacuum with their, often hostile, narratives.

Yes, reviewing my films, Europeans write that I continue the tradition of [Russian independent film-maker] Andrey Zvyagintsev. That’s how comparative analysis works: you look for comparisons. And they compared me with what they knew — Russians, Polish cinema and the Romanian new wave — due to the similarities of the architecture and the image. Still, I was inspired by Cassavetes, Béla Tarr, von Trier, and Miyazaki. Of course, we do have similarities with Romanians and Poles, as they started to reflect on the post-Soviet context and totalitarian regimes earlier than we did. These are comparable stories and destinies: we all suffered from Russian influence in one way or another. Romanian film directors, for example, are totally with us — they ask no questions about who fights on the right side in this war, since they understand us.

Now, we are in a sort of catastrophic moment, when Ukrainian cinema, which finally emerged and began to conquer international festivals and markets, is again challenged — by the great war. And here we also face a serious problem of the lack of understanding of what to do with our cinematography. Herewith, there are stories like the one about the Russia Today propagandist’s film getting into the Venice film festival in 2024 [the film Russians at war]— about good Russians who were forced to kill Ukrainians and who suffer terribly because of that. [Russian film director] Kirill Serebrennikov, while showing a movie about the fascist [agitator, politician and supporter of Russian annexations of Ukraine] Eduard Limonov in Cannes in 2024, for the event, remains an attractive ambassador of the beautiful Russia of the future. The Ukrainian state, on the other hand, pays little regard to both cinema and art policies at the institutional level, while the Western film community ignores our disposable, low-quality pictures.

Ukrainian culture loses continuity. As soon as the Russian empire loosens its grip, flowers bloom. Then, they try to destroy us again and everything we’d acquired is lost without further transfer, and we create a new culture as if from scratch (although that’s not actually the case). While the Russians have been evolving everything since Ivan the Terrible’s times, our culture has been interrupted and forgotten. We either mimic or rebel. The aggressor has been moving along the given trajectory for centuries, like the Chinese Empire, while our resistance is new every time. Mentally, our art is imbued with vitality. For the Russians, this is about the persistence of coercion and ‘die for your motherland,’ but for us — ‘heroes do not die.’ They die, of course, and we cry for them. But these are all vital codes filling our culture.

We like watching foreign movies since we perceive them as a fairy tale. When we see one about ourselves, it hurts us, and we turn away from it. It will take a lot of time for the audience to be able to critically look at themselves in films. Still, while we are growing up, we are starting to be destroyed again, and everything starts all over. Look at who we have lost: poet Volodymyr Vakulenko, writer Victoria Amelina, and artist Nika Kozhushko from Kharkiv.

All of us — everyone who has something to say — we are all targeted by the Russians.

Of course, without this tragedy, we would have already had a rather competitive nice market, albeit a small one. We’d have Dovzhenko’s students and keep [novelist and poet] Mykola Khvylovyi’s autographs at home. Yesterday, my friend showed me Parajanov’s script for his film, with his drawings, found by chance. This is an absolutely priceless artefact that is not yet properly appreciated, and that’s our big problem.

Now, trying to fill in these blank spots, we discover Mykola Khvylovyi and [poet] Yuriy Yanovskyi, and build bridges to our past, lacking resources for modern writers and modern cinema. That is why we delve, as if in an illusion, into Marvel with its superheroes, still knowing that this is not quite our story and all the ‘Batmen’ and ‘Supermen’ would definitely screw up at the frontline.”