A film studio founder from Philadelphia, Roman Kindrachuk finds himself torn between the land of his birth and that of his opportunity
played leading roles over the years. This week, we talk Roman Kindrachuk, executive producer and co-founder of the Radioaktive Film production studio.
“I have never worked in the United States,” says Philadelphia-born Roman Kindrachuk, 31, executive producer and co-founder of the Radioaktive Film production studio.
Kindrachuk became acquainted with Ukraine in 1994, when he came on a summer internship with RJR Tobacco. A year later Kindrachuk, after graduating with an international marketing degree from Georgetown University, he got a job in Germany with another tobacco firm, British American Tobacco.
But instead of Germany, Kindrachuk landed in Kyiv. A snafu with his German paperwork resulted in BAT sending him back here.
“I was only supposed to be here for a month,” he says, “a young guy just finished up at the university. It’s my first job. I was supposed to learn how the marketing department works.
“I was a young junior marketing guy, but for some reason I was introduced as a marketing manager. I was the first foreign guy here. And it was like: ‘Oh, thank God! The manager’s here! He knows what to do!’”
Since BAT needed a marketing director for their Ukrainian office, the usual long-term learning was compressed into an intensive six-month training program back in Germany, where Kindrachuk learned how to manage his department before returning.
“So I got a promotion by mistake,” he says.
For three years Kindrachuk worked to promote and market the Lucky Strike brand of cigarettes.
“I got free cigarettes from the company every month. Everybody does. So I had a big stack of cigarettes in my house. I used it to give to the militsionery as bribes.”
As is often the case with other ex-pats, some of Kindrachuk’s strongest memories of his early days in Ukraine revolve around drinking. Once, he says, he passed out on a bench in his tuxedo at a Carpathian village wedding before dinner was even served. He was carried inside by an old woman.
Show time
“Darko and I had known each other from the days when we were six years old. Our families are both Ukrainian, and they sent us to Ukrainian school every Saturday. And then Darko and I met here in a bar,” says Kindrachuk about the start of Radioaktive with his long-term partner, Darko Skulsky. “Darko was working here with the ad agency Leo Burnett and I was in marketing as a client.
“In 1998 we both saw that at that point advertising in Ukraine was growing and a lot of clients – international and local – wanted to shoot TV advertisements, and there was nobody in the country that could do it.”
Production, Kindrachuk says, was done either abroad or in Russia.
“So we looked around and said, ‘Okay. Our jobs are getting boring. It’s time to do something cool and special.’ So we started a production company.” Their third partner was “an American kid” who knew about photography and worked as a creative director.
“Our first office was a cafe under the fountain by Zoloty Vorota. We had a mobile phone and a laptop computer and held all our meetings there, and as soon as it got colder we moved into my apartment,” Kindrachuk says.
The first days were a struggle. In August of 1998 they quit their jobs and doled out money for equipment, but as soon as they were ready to deal with clients the financial collapse wiped out much of the business activity in the region. Advertising budgets were among the first things to go.
“So we sat for a lot time doing absolutely nothing.”
Their salvation came from Germany. Friends who had a production company needed to shoot a low-budget music video with “a beautiful girl in a Russian-style village.” They remembered “those crazy American kids in Kyiv,” Kindrachuk says, and became one of their first clients.
The Germans did the creative work while Radioaktive provided the technical support. The clients left satisfied. Still, Kindrachuk remembers some challenging moments from that time: bitter cold that froze the camera, no telephone lines, no water, no lights and trying to feed a German vegetarian crewmember in a Ukrainian village “in the middle of nowhere.”
“It was fun. It was cool. And they came here and liked us and the way we worked. It was cheap and the people were good. So they started coming back to us,” he says.
Given the affordability and the unusual settings available here, Germans clients came to like shooting videos in Kyiv, and Radioaktive was on the spot.
Ad it up
These days, with the Ukrainian ad market flourishing and the relative ease of shooting in Ukraine, the company’s main activity is filming commercials for Ukrainian and international clients. Whereas in the West most companies shoot only two per month, Radioaktive is far busier. In August alone the company shot roughly a dozen commercials.
Radioaktive has grown and developed over the years and now employs about 30 people. Kindrachuk says it is the largest turnover production company in Kyiv. They even recently opened up a second office in New York City, hoping to draw American clients.
“Just as we organized for foreign clients to shoot commercials here, we’re now talking to a lot of studios in Hollywood about shooting their films in Ukraine,” he says
Just this year, the company was involved in the production of its first film.
“We had some friends and partners in Los Angeles that invited us to be co-producers of a horror film called ‘The Hatchet,’ which we filmed in L.A. with American actors,” he says, adding that horror movies could become a Radioaktive specialty: their next movie is to be a horror movie about Alfred Hitchcock.
Kindrachuk admits, however, that he likes comedies, and in the future he wants to try to make good-quality Western-style sitcoms and Ukrainian films, as soon as the market is ready for them.
“My dream is to make Radioaktive a global brand, doing things all over the world. So people would think… ‘Wow! They do cool stuff.’”
Stuck on you
“I will always be somehow tied to Ukraine. This is my business, my baby here,” Kindrachuk says.
“I can’t believe I’ve been here 10 years. I remember when starting in 1999, every year I was thinking, ‘Okay. This is my last year here. I definitely have to move back to the West.’ But then it kept staying interesting here, and Radioaktive kept growing…. It got to the point where I couldn’t possibly imagine quitting Radioaktive and going to work for somebody else.”
When asked about the future, Kindrachuk seems torn between his land of birth and the land of opportunity.
“I will probably end up spending half of the year in the United States and half of the year here and having two homes, one probably in Los Angeles,” he says.
His other tie here aside from work is his Ukrainian wife, Olga, and her child. After living here for so long, Kindrachuk feels rooted despite having experienced the slight culture gap that Diaspora Ukrainians often do.
“We spoke Ukrainian at home and I was convinced I was not American, I was a Ukrainian guy. When I first came to Ukraine and met Ukrainians, I realized how much of an American I am,” he says.
“I consider myself American even though I say ‘nash’ (ours) and ‘my’ when talking about Ukraine. I feel this is my place, and now Kyiv is my home.”
