While hundreds of filmmakers, sales agents and distributors were descending on Amsterdam for IDFA’s industry event The Forum over the weekend, another documentary festival was taking place far away in war-torn Ukraine.
The Docudays UA International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival was held in Kyiv, lasting only from 11-13 November, with few international guests in attendance and no industry events.
Films screening included Oleksiy Radynski’s Infinity: According To Florian, Pawel Lozinski’s The Balcony and Theo Anthony’s All Light, Everywhere.
The organisers had sourced a generator and one of Elon Musk’s Starlinks to ensure the show went on regardless of power cuts. Ticket prices were reduced. Most of the funding to hold the event came through the Swedish Embassy’s Sida programme. Next year, the organisers hope to be back in their usual late March dates, war with Russia permitting.
Nonetheless, the fact this year’s event happened at all is testament to the current strength of Ukrainian production - and to the resilience of festival organisers.
IDFA is just one of many recent festivals to have had a strong representation of Ukrainian titles in its programme - and to have hosted delegations of Ukrainian producers and filmmakers. (IDFA has also invited Ukrainian film curators.)
Ukrainian titles screening this week in Amsterdam have included the late Lithuanian director Mantas Kvedaravičius’s Mariupolis and Mariupolis 2 and When Spring Came to Bucha from Mila Teshaieva and Marcus Lenz.
Fictional features like Butterfly Vision, Pamfir and Klondike have been feted at major international festivals throughout 2022, with some now in awards contention.
Ukrainian new wave
While acknowledging the strength of the “Ukrainian new wave,” local observers aren’t sure how long the current renaissance will last.
Darya Bassel, co-producer of A House Made Of Splinters (which plays in IDFA’s Best of Fests section) and producer of Butterfly Vision and one of the organisers of Docudays, dates the resurgence in the Ukrainian industry to events almost a decade ago.
“This “new wave” was born on Maidan in 2013,” Bassel said, referring to the protest movements after the Ukrainian government’s decision not to tie the country more closely to the EU.
“The great thing was that there was a big splash of creativity because of all these events. It also coincided with the financing opportunities that were available for Ukrainian filmmakers in Ukraine. The State actually created a proper system of film financing. This splash of creativity was obvious not just in documentary but in all areas of cultural life and arts,” Bassel stated.
However, she pointed out that funding is now drying up and that talented young artists and filmmakers are leaving the country. “Everybody wants to come back but we don’t know when it will be possible.”
Bassel has been at the IDFA Forum with director Olha Zhurba to pitch their new feature documentary, Displaced, a “collective portrait” of Ukrainians since the war with Russia started. This includes footage of refugees boarding trains in Kyiv in March, of life in liberated villages, and of a worker in a bread factory.
The filmmakers are coproducing with Danish outfit, Final Cut For Real, and Swedish partner We Have A Plan, which joined the project at Nordic Panorama. The film should be ready by next summer.
Bassel also produced Zhurba’s recent doc Outside, which is in IDFA’s Docs For Sale, about a street urchin who becomes the face of the Ukrainian revolution of 2014. The film, sold by Deckert Distribution, premiered at CPH:DOX.
Through her production company Moon Man, Bassel is now working with director Iryna Tsilyk (The Earth Is Big As An Orange) on a new animated documentary feature, Red Zone. This is based on Tsilyk’s personal experiences in the war and during the Maidan revolution. “She wants to look into the role of a woman in the war and how you, as a woman experience this. When it comes to the safety of your children, how do you act?” Bassel said. “Through animation, you can better deal with sensitive topics and you can play with your imagination.”
Meanwhile, Bassel is collaborating with UK director Sarah McCarthy on Children Of War, a new doc about children during the Ukrainian war who were forcibly sent to Russia.
Filmmaker solidarity
Other Ukrainian producers in Amsterdam this week have spoken about the solidarity that now exists in the industry.
“Ukrainian documentarists, we support each other all the time,” commented producer Alexandra Bratyshchenko, who has been in town for screenings of Igor Ivanko’s Fragile Memory, which plays in IDFA’s Best Of Fests. The documentary is about the director’s grandfather, Leonid Burlaka, a prominent cinematographer in the Soviet era.
Bratyshchenko herself is working with fellow Ukrainian producer Ivanna Khitsinska on Yuliia Hontaruk’s Company Of Steel, one of the Ukrainian feature docs to have received financial support from IDFA’s Bertha Fund. This follows veterans still recovering from the mental scars of war in eastern Ukraine in 2014 and who now have to confront the new trauma of the Russian invasion. The director has followed her characters for eight years.
“This is a big artistic investigation of how people change, their minds change and everything changes [during war],” Khitsinska commented. The project is being made through Babylon 13, the association of independent filmmakers formed after Maidan and the 2013 “Revolution of Dignity.” This is a volunteer-based organisation of more than 80 film professionals including cinematographers, directors, sound technicians. Much of their work is made freely available on YouTube.
As Bratyshchenko points out, Ukrainian filmmakers regularly work on each other’s projects. For example, Mariia Ponomarova is the “creative producer” of Fragile Memory but is also director on Tabor Productions new documentary Nice Ladies, about a team of senior cheerleaders from eastern Ukraine.
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