When New Zealand director Luke Huxham visited Ukraine for the first time in 2018, his expectations of the country were based on a number of stereotypes, none of which proved to be true, he says.
Just a year later, he came back to Kyiv to make a short film ridiculing those same false ideas foreigners usually have about Ukraine.
“I wanted to make fun of how myself and others thought of Ukraine before actually visiting it in person,” Huxham told the Kyiv Post.
On May 30, Kyiv Day, his “Ukraine. Pretty Cool Place” was finally published on Vimeo.
“Dedicated to all my amazing friends and the awful stereotypes and misconceptions the world has of this beautiful part of the world,” the film’s description reads.
Huxham, 34, is now based in Japan. He is known for shooting advertisements for popular car brands like Mercedes and Nissan.
In 2018, he was invited to shoot a Lexus commercial in Kyiv, together with Radioaktive Film, one of Ukraine’s top production companies. That was his first time in Ukraine.
The director says he had a similar experience of having wrong ideas about a foreign country when moving to Japan. This repeated in Ukraine.
Huxham expected to see a country in crippling danger of Russia’s war spreading further, people speaking English with a terribly strong accent and radioactive contamination from the Chornobyl nuclear power plant.
“I was brainwashed by the Hollywood stereotypes,” Huxham writes in the film description.
New Zealand director Luke Huxham (3L) and the crew on the set of the short film “Ukraine. Pretty Cool Place,” shot in Kyiv in July 2019.
However, soon after landing in Ukraine, the director’s perception changed drastically.
“My impressions just flipped after a couple of hours, I felt quite embarrassed of what I previously thought of Ukraine,” Huxham says. “I never felt as if I was in danger even once when I was there.”
“Ukraine. Pretty Cool Place” starts with a sequence of clips from movies and foreign news coverage about Ukraine, summarizing a stereotypical image of the country abroad.
The title’s “cool” symbolizes both a misconception that all Ukrainians are “cold” or “indifferent” and the director’s experience of “awesome” Ukraine.
The viewer is then greeted by a Ukrainian guide, who speaks English with a strong Eastern European accent and is dressed in some bizarre 1990s outfit. He narrates the whole video and guides the audience all around Kyiv.
The film makes fun of common misconceptions, like the one that all Ukrainians are tough people. Another one was the demonized image of the 2013-2014 EuroMaidan Revolution portrayed by Russian state media as a violent uprising.
UKRAINE . Pretty Cool Place from Luke Huxham on Vimeo.
Huxham teamed up with Radioaktive Film to make the video in the summer of 2019. With a $5,000-budget, it took the crew five days to find actors, locations and shoot all the footage.
The post-production, however, took more than a year and a half to complete due to the elaborate editing and animation elements. During this phase, the film has also grown to an international project, with professionals from South Africa and France involved.
Less than a week after publishing the film, on June 4, Huxham released a backstage video, including his comments on his motivation to do the project.
Huxham says that “Ukraine. Pretty Cool Place” is one of his favorite works as a director. He believes that, most likely, he will continue to shoot in Ukraine.
“I would shoot every project ever in Ukraine if I could,” Huxham says.
