ODESA – The fifth installment of Ukraine’s Odessa International Film Festival came to a muted end on July 19, after Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 was shot down over Donetsk just two days earlier. Organizers canceled a planned gala celebration and instead offered a moment of memorial at the beginning of the closing awards program.
From an unauthorized “Putler Kaput” banner on the red carpet – to explosions at two PrivatBank locations in Odesa, the festival was far from insulated from Ukraine’s crisis, but it nevertheless managed to finish its nine-day screening program in entirety. For some Ukrainians, however, the biggest controversy was whether the film festival should have proceeded in a country whose war effort is grasping for funds. Organizers defended their choice, saying that to ignore the nation’s culture would be to repeat a tragic mistake for Ukraine.
“We used to do our best to forget about culture – because it’s such a sensitive part of our lives.” said Julia Sinkevich, the executive director of the festival. “But in the long-term perspective, it’s building a cultural identity that matters.”
Sinkevich is credited with launching a crowdsourcing campaign that allowed the festival to proceed on a budget less than half the size of previous years. The Ukrainian government contributed no funding to the festival this year, but Sinkevich is adamant that the festival will apply for state support next year. Without some state funding, she says, holding an important international film festival is next to impossible.
Likewise, Ukrainian directors in Odesa said state funding of film projects is also needed.
“It’s very difficult to devote money to the film industry while in the country is war and all finances should go to the war effort,” admitted Volodymyr Tykhy, whose film The Green Jacket, a feature describing the 2011 climate of depression in Ukraine, debuted at the festival. “But you can’t interrupt a culture in development. It’s important not only for the country as a whole, but for each individual citizen.”
Tykhy and other experts in the Ukrainian film industry say the country’s recent events are sparking a new wave in Ukrainian cinema: “Just one year ago in Ukraine, cultural development was slow, it was lying dormant. Today, the Ukrainian consciousness is reacting to the events around it. It has become more aware. It started to realize its potential.”
Three films at the Odesa festival documented this year’s Euromaidan Revolution: Sergiy Loznitsa’s documentary-epic Maidan; Babylon’13, which began presenting footage from Maidan worldwide early in December last year; and Black Book of Maidan, a student film project involving 13 collaborators with cameras trained on the revolution.
With Ukraine relentlessly in world headlines, international attention has also begun to focus on this new wave of Ukrainian cinema. Representatives from the Cottbus Film Festival in Germany came to Odesa with the hope of selecting films to feature later this year in a section of their program that will be devoted to recent developments in Ukrainian cinema.
Some of the most critically successful Ukrainian films this year were not explicitly political, but instead depict scenes from Ukrainian life. In May at the Cannes Film Festival, Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s film The Tribe, about a Ukrainian boarding school for the deaf, took top prizes at Critic’s Week.
In Odesa, the top national prize winner was Crepuscule by Valentyn Vasyanovych, a documentary following an old woman and her blinded son as they attempt to survive the difficulties of life in rural Ukraine. Internationally, the best film award went to a Georgian film, Blind Dates. The festival’s top prize, the OIFF Grand Prix, went to an Israeli film called Zero Motivation, a black comedy about the conflict in Israel, which also won accolades at Tribecca.
“We think we managed to bring a sense of unity in the films we presented,” said Sinkevich. “We will work to make the festival bigger and better next year.” The sixth edition of the Odessa International Film Festival will be held on July 10-18, 2015, according to a festival press release.
William Schreiber is a Coca-Cola World Fellow at Yale University. He can be reached on Twitter @geschreiben or at [email protected]
