Ukrainian film-maker Oles Sanin makes his long-awaited debut with "Mamay" Low-budget epic tells the tale of Cossack and Tatar legends and becomes Ukraine's first movie ever produced with Dolby Surround Sound
apse. Specialists leave the country as fast as they are produced, perpetuating the brain-drain toward Moscow and the West.
Though new films do come out every once in a while, critics pan them anyway. Consider the recent scandal of the self-indulgent, three-hour marathon “A Prayer for Hetman Mazepa.” To many, this was the last nail in the industry’s coffin.
In its darkest hour, however, Ukraine’s film industry may be in for a pleasant surprise: the premiere of “Mamay” on Feb. 19. Director of the low-budget creation, Oles Sanin may have just demonstrated that Ukrainian film-makers will not go quietly, but will kick and scream before the genre is officially pronounced dead. Even critics have high hopes, such as Molodist Film Festival co-organizer and noted movie critic, Alik Shpylyuk.
A New Hope
“We await every new film with hope,” Shpylyuk said to reporters in Kyiv after the film’s international premiere in Nov. 2002. “‘Mamay’ has come to the viewer following a long and thorny path. Having seen parts of it, I am looking forward to the final version, certain to relish it.”
“Mamay” is a romantic legend based on a blend of Ukrainian and Tatar epics and set in the Crimea sometime between the 1500s and 1700s. “On the Black Sea, on the white stone, there stood a dungeon of flint,” the story begins, echoing the words of a famous Cossack ballad.
The movie’s title, like the storyline, holds a variety of different meanings taken from different cultures. In Turkic languages, the film’s title means “no one,” but it was also the name of a famous Mongol conqueror, the great grandson of Ghengis-Khan. In Persian legends, mamay literally means “the spirit of the steppes.”
A keen folklore researcher, Sanin found this information while trying to explain the mystery of Cossack Mamay, the hero and guardian of the Ukrainian Steppe.
“Cossack Mamay is a symbol of Ukrainian Cossackdom, almost a demi-god,” Sanin said. “There are many depictions of Mamay. He sits in the pose of Buddha wearing a Turkish garment and playing some Arabian string instrument. But nobody knows anything about him.”
Underneath many paintings of this legendary man, an inscription can be found written in Ukrainian: “No one knows who I am, and no one will say anything about me. But when you come to the Steppes, you will hear my story.”
And Sanin decided to tell his own story of mamay – a parable about chivalry and the struggle for freedom.
Mysterious, philosophical, and at times beautiful in its cinematography, “Mamay” represents a type of film-making that rarely finds its way onto the big screen. The style and aesthetic qualities of the film are unique to contemporary Ukrainian audiences. “Mamay” is more of a dynamic, evolving work of art than a movie, a film more absorbed than watched.
“‘Mamay’ is especially interesting for critics and many chief players in the crew – including the director and main actors. [For them] it was a creative first,” Shpylyuk said.
While some critics have suggested that the film was made with a “poetic” aesthetic reminiscent of the 1960s, others say it’s the vision of a talented and artistic cinematographer. “Mamay’s” director of photography happens to be one of Ukraine’s top cameramen, Serhy Mykhalchuk, winner of the award for best cinematography at the San Sebastian Film Festival in Nov. 2002.
And the music – it’s hard to tell what it is, or what inspired it: the breath of the wind, or a grandmother’s lullaby? Is it a Cossack march or a Tatar wedding song? In fact, it could be all of these things. While composing the music for the film, Ukrainian Alla Zagaikevych invented a special technique that blends live music and synthesized sounds.
To present Zagaikevych’s musical score in all its fullness, “Mamay” was produced using Dolby Surround Sound, a first for Ukraine’s film industry.
Considering the artistry of the movie and its film-makers, some viewers may find it hard to believe that “Mamay” is a state production, ordered and financed by Ukraine’s Ministry of Culture with a paltry budget of $200,000.
This fact is exactly what Sanin wants to get across to audiences.
“‘Mamay’ is my attempt to prove to myself and to the state that it is possible to make movies in Ukraine,” he said.
The proving ground
Sanin’s attempts to prove himself in television and film continue to roll, and for someone with a relatively short career, the 30-year-old Lutsk native is already quite well-known as a film industry personality. For the last six years, he has been working as the head of TV projects and the documentaries department at the Internews Network in Ukraine, having made dozens of documentaries, short films and TV programs, many of them award-winners. His most-recent documentary “The Sin” gained a Brothers Lumieres silver medal from France, was twice the winner of best directed documentary at two separate Moscow film festivals, and also won two prizes at the Open Night Festival in Kyiv in 2000.
It took Sanin more than two years to complete his debut full-length feature, though the filming itself took only 24 days. Why the discrepancy? Call it a matter of principle.
Sanin wanted to make the film using only state money. An American company, Good Factory Films, offered to co-produce “Mamay” with Sanin, but he refused.
“If it says ‘Ukraine/USA’ in the subtitles, everyone will say ‘Of course, it’s a good film; it was made in the States’,” Sanin said.
In this film, just as Sanin had hoped, everything that could be done in Ukraine was carried out domestically.
“We had many problems, but I was prepared for everything,” Sanin continued. “I’ve seen and heard many [discouraging] stories about how films are made in Ukraine.” Many such stories are his own, like the one about the time when film equipment was stolen from the Dovzhenko film studio in Kyiv. It was several months into the filming, and the crew had to start over from scratch.
In October 2001 at the Molodist Film Festival, Sanin presented a 30-minute montage of clips from the new film. A month later, the rough copy of the film was complete and the crew was waiting for money to start editing.
By the summer of 2002, they were still waiting. Sanin presented the material at the Ministry of Culture, but was told to keep waiting; the $3,000,000 production of “Bohdan Khmelnytsky” was first on the financing list. Sanin needed a mere fraction of this amount to finish his film.
Part of the production costs for “Mamay” eventually came from Sanin’s and “Mamay” film producer Aram Gevorkyan’s pockets. “Instead of buying diapers for our children, we were using that money to finish the film,” Sanin recalled.
“In Ukraine, if you don’t take constant care of your film, it dies pre-maturely,” Sanin explained, “so you have to be like a conscientious mother, taking care of the baby while it’s still in the womb.”
To save his film, Sanin approached various people and showed them rough cuts. His efforts paid off. The long-distance telephone provider Utel gave $50,000 to sponsor a promotional campaign and screenings.
Sounding off
The most amazing success involves the “Mamay” soundtrack. The music doesn’t simply provide an accompaniment to the film, but is almost a character of its own. “The sound solution for the film required volume. We needed not one or two channels, but seven,” Zagaikevych explained. Her verdict was that the film needed Dolby Surround Sound.
The crew was still waiting for governmental financing when the Dolby Digital Company in London did them an incredible favor, agreeing to wait one month for payment for recording equipment. In addition, since “Mamay” was the first Ukrainian film to purchase the Dolby license, it was granted a discount. Olha Kyrylyuk, the film’s sound producer, was made a Dolby Digital representative and consultant in Ukraine.
“‘Mamay’ is Ukraine’s first film to completely comply with the world’s technical requirements,” Kyrylyuk said. “It can run in quality cinemas and come out on the international market, which no other Ukrainian film could do before.”
As of now, 10 copies of “Mamay” have been printed, and after the Feb. 19th premiere in Kyiv’s Ukraina Cinema, the film will play in Dolby Surround cinemas all across Ukraine. Still, Sanin doubts that “Mamay” will become a blockbuster.
“If we consider what is catered to today’s viewer as fashionable, my film is unfashionable,” Sanin said. Many of his colleagues even advised him to slightly rework the film and turn it into a love story or a Cossack western, but he refused.
“The film was not made according to mainstream rules. It is not a story of the [Hollywood] entertainment genre. Rather, it brings to mind art,” he said.
In Ukraine’s present economic situation, an artsy film bodes financial failure, and Sanin knows this. “But nothing called art is conceived with the purpose of commercial success in mind,” he said.
