The 2015 Sundance Film Festival, a famous platform for independent cinema that takes place annually in the American state of Utah, gave Ukraine a bit of the spotlight.
For the first time in the history of Sundance, a Ukrainian director won a grant and two Ukrainian-themed movies received awards on Jan. 31.
One of them was “Russian Woodpecker” (2014), a documentary about the Chornobyl nuclear power plant disaster that won the World Cinema Documentary Grand Jury Prize, one of the festival’s main awards. It was co-produced by Ukraine, the United States and Great Britain and directed by American Chad Gracia.
The movie tells a story of Ukrainian artist Fedor Aleksandrovich who has a theory that the Chornobyl disaster was an inside job by the Soviet authorities, for which Ukraine still pays the price. The movie echoes with Russia’s war against Ukraine. With the conflic raging in Ukraine, Gracia says he fears for the safety of his former Ukrainian co-workers, artist Aleksandrovich and cameraman Artiom Ryzhykov.
They tried their best to spread the word of Ukraine’s current sufferings from the stage of the Sundance Festival.
When receiving the award, Alexandrovich, the main focus of the documentary and production designer of the movie, addressed the audience with a call to save Ukraine.
“Save Ukraine now. Tomorrow will be too late. Now the Kremlin attacks Ukraine. Next will be Europe. Next will be World War,” he said from the stage.
Ryzhykov, the cameraman, addressed the issue at the movie’s Q&A session on Jan. 30.
“I’m afraid for my country. And I’m afraid for the whole world. Because there’s a terrorist in power in Russia that might destroy all of us,” Ryzhykov said.
Another Ukrainian star of the festival was Myroslav Slaboshpytsky, the director who seized spotlight in 2014 with his acclaimed feature film “The Tribe” about deaf teenagers. Slaposhpytsky won the Global Filmmaking Award from the Sundance Institute.
The prize came with a $10,000 grant that will fund the director’s next feature film “Luxembourg.” The new movie will tell a story of a police officer who confronts professional and personal challenges while working in the exclusion zone in present-day Chornobyl.
With most modern Ukrainian-themed movies featuring Chornobyl, the EuroMaidan Revolution or Ukrain’s war against Russian-led separatists, it was a breath of fresh air when a Short Film Jury Award in a non-fiction category went to the film featuring children actors’ audition in Ukraine.
“The Face of Ukraine: Casting Oksana Baiul” (2014) shot by Australian director Kitty Green, features an audition for the role of Oksana Baiul, a figure skater who at the age of 16 won the first Olympic gold medal in the history of Ukraine in 1994. It wasn’t Kitty Green’s first film about Ukraine. Before that she released a documentary about Femen, a Ukrainian female protest group whose activists were famous for going bare-breasted at their protest actions.
Kyiv Post staff writer Victoria Petrenko can be reached at [email protected].
