EDMONTON, Canada – In 1929, the Soviet government started a rural collectivization program in Ukraine, forcing millions of peasants to give away their land and join state farms.
Dictator Josef Stalin had a two-fold aim: Crush the spirit of independence and rebellion to the Soviet Union among Ukrainians, and take their food to finance his rapid and forced industrialization.
The catastrophic result became a genocide that is not yet universally recognized as such even today: By 1932-1933, people were starving in the millions, the fields were black and empty and emaciated corpses were lying in the streets.
The Soviet Union tried to keep a tight lid of secrecy on the man-made famine, known as the Holodomor, that killed at least 3.9 million people in Ukraine and more in Russia’s southern region of Kuban. Some estimates place the death toll as high as 7 million people.
The West, by and large, ignored the mass starvation in order to build relations with Stalin.
However, then as now, people tried to shed light on the true story. One of them was Rhea Clyman. The Canadian journalist was born in Toronto in 1904 to a Polish-Jewish family. At the age of 28, she became one of the first and few journalists to expose the Holodomor at the time. She died in 1981.
Her stories in the Toronto Telegram and London Daily Express never received much international attention until recently.
Two years ago historian Jars Balan, a professor from the University of Alberta, started looking at the Canadian coverage of the Holodomor. He discovered more than 20 articles she had filed in the Toronto Telegram in late 1932.
Some 85 years later, Clyman’s own story was finally heard thanks to Andrew Tkach, a French-American filmmaker who helped to visualize Clyman’s journey to Soviet Ukraine through the documentary “Hunger For Truth: The Rhea Clyman Story.”
This is the trailer of “Hunger For Truth: The Rhea Clyman Story,” directed by Andrew Tkach.
Taking up the assignment
When Tkach was contacted by the Canada-Ukraine Foundation to do a movie about Clyman, he was hesitant.
“I had never really done a film about the past and I wasn’t even convinced that I should be doing the film about the past because I’m much more into showing people’s stories in the moment,” Tkach explained in a telephone interview with the Kyiv Post.
Tkach has more than 25 years of experience producing documentaries and TV magazine reports, winning eight News Emmys, the highest honor in American TV broadcasting. For 13 years he was Christiane Amanpour’s long-form producer at CNN Reports and CBS-TV’s long-running weekly news show “60 Minutes.” He is currently the executive producer of Giving Nature a Voice, a weekly environmental documentary TV series on Kenya’s NTV channel.
Andrew Tkach works on the site in Kenya where he produces a TV show Giving Nature a Voice. Courtesy Andrew Tkach.
Tkach is not a novice when it comes to telling stories about Ukraine’s tumultuous past: In 2015, he produced a documentary “Generation Maidan: A Year of Revolution & War,” about the 100-day EuroMaidan Revolution that drove President Viktor Yanukovych into Russian exile on Feb. 22, 2013.
He has always been interested in Ukraine. During the Orange Revolution, Tkach covered Ukraine with Amanpour for the 60 Minutes TV show. When the EuroMaidan erupted, Tkach and Ukraine’s Babylon’13 crew followed the protesters’ fate as they overthrew Yanukovych and later went off to the war zone defending Ukraine from Russian invasion.
Taking on Clyman’s story, he had a clear vision on the message it should convey.
“From the very beginning I knew that if I’m going to accept this assignment I wanted it to be reflecting on both: 1930s and what’s happening today,” Tkach says. “If you just limit your discussion to events that happened a long time ago, people can put it into a certain mental box – like a former tragedy that happened long time ago. It’s interesting but it doesn’t touch them deeply.”
He is convinced the film can move the audience more as a contemporary story: “It was important to show that what happened in the ‘30s is continuing today,” the filmmaker explains.
Hunger for emotion
The 76-minute feature-length documentary interweaves Clyman’s truth-telling trip to the Soviet Union with ongoing events in Ukraine’s Donbas.
Clyman was always a fighter: She was run over by a streetcar in Toronto when she was 11 and lost her leg. She was determined to become a reporter and decided that becoming an international correspondent was her best chance for a career breakthrough. She was curious about the Soviet Union and the image of it as a communist workers’ paradise. She went there to become a researcher for Walter Duranty, the now-discredited New York Times reporter, considered the dean of the Moscow press corps at the time, denied the existence of the Holodomor and was a Stalin lackey.
When Clyman saw the brutal realities of Stalin’s Soviet Union, she rejected Duranty’s approach and she set off on a car trip with two other women to discover the Holodomor. She was expelled from the Soviet Union for her coverage in late 1932.
But that’s not the whole story.
Tkach takes it further and decides to focus on the family of Serhiy Hlondar, a special forces officer, who was captured near eastern Ukraine’s Debaltseve the day after the so-called declaration of truce was signed in Minsk on Feb. 15, 2015. Hlondar has been in captivity ever since. He has never seen his youngest daughter whom he asked to name Anna in a telephone conversation with his wife. Since 2016, the family hasn’t heard his voice.
“The resistance in eastern Ukraine to Russian invasion has resulted in personal tragedy,” Tkach says. “None of us expected Serhiy to be in prison a year later,” Tkach admits, adding that he keeps in touch with Hlondar family.
“All this shows how people are affected by the Russian aggression. The conflict stops being abstract then. There’s always a reaction against aggression and imperialism and we see that big powerful forces can be resisted by individuals.”
When Tkach was away from Ukraine, Serhiy Stetsenko, an operator with Babylon’13 and filmmaker Volodymyr Tykhyi performed directorial work while Denys Vorontsov was a co-producer and Roman Liubyi edited the movie. The film includes soundtracks by Jamala and bands ONUKA, DakhaBrakha, and Dakh Daughters, who agreed to participate on “very below-market terms.”
Russia’s war in Ukraine continues without end, Tkach says, and it is “totally off the pages of many newspapers let alone Western newspapers.”
“That’s something that strikes me the most,” he says.
Looking into the future
To produce the documentary, Tkach took a two-month leave from the Aga Khan Graduate School of Media and Communications in Kenya where he teaches.
He calls his work on the documentary “a never-ending process.”
“There is still so much that can be discovered,” he says. “Supposedly (Clyman) wrote a memoir but nobody has found it yet. Jars (Balan) is still searching,” Tkach says.
While working on the documentary, Tkach was lucky to get in touch with Clyman’s distant relatives and discover rare photos from the albums of Alexander Wienerberger, the Austrian engineer who documented Ukraine’s famine ravaging Kharkiv, the eastern Ukrainian city of 1 million people.
His original photos, taken with a Leica camera, were reborn in the movie as motion graphics and 3D images created by Belarusian artist Alexei Terekhov, who is living in Canada.
Tkach said he wants to create a series about Ukraine’s past, present and future. While past and present were depicted in both “Hunger for Truth” and “Generation Maidan,” the future is still uncertain.
“To me, the next film should look into where the country is going, what’s happening to the young people, the situations from the high-tech world to brain-drain. It’s a project I’d be interested to look at,” he said.
More about ‘The Hunger for Truth: The Rhea Clyman Story’
In an age when disinformation muddles the truth, a newly discovered voice cuts through the historical haze. She is Rhea Clyman, a young Canadian reporter who traversed the starving Soviet heartland when Josef Stalin’s man-made famine was just beginning. Clyman’s newly discovered newspaper articles from 1932-33 show her remarkable resourcefulness and courage. After she was banished from the USSR for writing about the Holodomor and the Gulag, this brave woman went on to cover Adolph Hitler’s early lethal years in power.
Today another Russian autocrat is trying to dismember Ukraine by using disinformation and brute force. Three years into Ukraine’s forgotten war, its soldiers are still held as prisoners of war. In central Ukraine two little girls are growing up without their dad – Serhiy Hlondar. He’s a member of Ukraine’s Special Forces who was captured in the battle of Debaltseve, a day after Russian led forces were meant to silence their guns in the Minsk 2 Peace Accord. Hlondar has never seen his youngest daughter, and after 700 days of captivity his family has received only seven letters to keep their hopes alive.
The feature-length documentary interweaves Clyman’s truth-telling trip during the 1930s with today’s conflict in eastern Ukraine. Combining rare archive photos, historical perspective and today’s real life drama, the film shows the power of truth telling in the face of disinformation.
“Hunger For Truth,” directed by Andrew Tkach is a co-production of Canada Ukraine Foundation, Messy Moment Media, and #Babylon’13. The film features Ukraine’s most prominent musical voices: Jamala, Onuka, DakhaBrakha and Dakh Daughters.
See also: “Hunger For Truth: The Rhea Clyman Story” tells how brave Canadian journalist wrote about Holodomor
Editor’s Note: The first English-language screening of “Hunger for Truth: The Rhea Clyman Story” will take place in Kyiv at 7 p.m. on Nov. 26 at Oskar Kino in the Gulliver Shopping Center, 1A Sportyvna Square. The documentary’s director, Andrew Tkach, will attend the event sponsored by the Canadian Embassy in Ukraine, the Institute of International Education in Ukraine and the Kyiv Post. Seating is limited to the invitation-only event. For information on ticket availability, write to Kyiv Post chief editor Brian Bonner at [email protected]
