More than 200 people attended an invitation-only screening of the 2017 documentary “Hunger For Truth: The Rhea Clyman Story” at Oskar Kino Theater in Kyiv’s Gulliver Shopping Center on Nov. 26.
While the film has been shown before in Ukraine in the Ukrainian langue, the event marked the first English-language screening of Emmy award-winning director Andrew Tkach’s story of Canadian journalist Clyman’s determination to expose Josef Stalin’s Holodomor against the Ukrainian people, even as Western governments and other Western journalists were denying or downplaying the deliberate starvation of at least 3.9 million Ukrainians in 1932-1933. The production was sponsored by the Canada-Ukraine Foundation in Toronto.
Clyman lived from 1904 to 1981 and wrote news articles for the Evening Telegram in Toronto and the Daily Express in London. Ignoring a travel ban outside of Moscow imposed on foreign correspondents, Clyman and two other women traveled to Kharkiv, the eastern Ukrainian city, the eastern Donbas in Ukraine and the Kuban region of southern Russia. Soviet authorities expelled her on Sept. 17, 1932.
The event was co-sponsored by the Kyiv Post, the Canadian Embassy in Ukraine, the Fulbright Program in Ukraine and Ukrainian Jewish Encounter.
Ukrainian Jewish Encounter called Clyman, a Jewish woman whose family immigrated to Canada from Poland, “an extraordinary person and journalists. At a time when too many reporters knew of Stalin’s man-made famine that gripped Soviet Ukraine, but preferred to remain silent or lie about its origins, Clyman filed dispatches with headlines that read ‘Children Live on Grass Only,’ ‘Food in Farm Area Grain Taken From Them,’ ‘Mile After Mile of Deserted Villages in Ukraine Farm Area Tells Story of Soviet Invasion.'”
Read Kyiv Post coverage of “Hunger For Truth: The Rhea Clyman Story” here:
‘Hunger for Truth’ documents Canadian journalist Rhea Clyman’s work on Holodomor, Ukraine’s fight today (VIDEO) – Nov. 21, 2018
‘Hunger for Truth: The Rhea Clyman Story’ tells how brave Canadian journalist wrote about Holodomor – June 28, 2018
