A series of lectures on the current state of and challenges faced by Ukrainian cinema as it tries to shake off the crippling legacy of the Soviet past and to adapt to the fast-moving reality of a post-Soviet Ukraine. Each presentation will be followed by screening of films representing a wide range of contemporary Ukrainian directors, genres and subjects. The events are FREE and open to the public.
New Films and New Names from Ukraine. A parade of Canadian premiers.
Duration 120 min
A selection of short films in various genres will give the viewer the idea of what’s cooking on the cutting edge of Ukrainian filmmaking today. Despite the absence of government and private support Ukrainian national film is alive and throbbing with new talent. The program includes Cross, dir. Maryna Vroda, the sensational winner of the Cannes 2011 Palme d’or du court métrage, world’s most prestigious award, March of the Fleas, dir. Taras Tkachenko, the Best Ukrainian Film Award at the Odesa International Film Festival-2011, Last Letter, dir. Yurii Kovaliov, Beyond Frames, dir. Maksym Ksionda, I Have a Friend, dir. Dmytro Moiseiev, Continuity, dir. Polina Kelm, the new and deliciously funny animations by Stepan Koval To Become Firm, Carol of the Bells, and by Oleksander Shmyhun Oh, Paris! All the shorts will be screened in Canada for the first time ever.
All films are in Ukrainian with English subtitles.
The screening is co-sponsored by the Canadian Foundation for Ukrainian Studies.
Recovered Gems of Ukrainian Classical Film: Forbidden Paradzhanov meets Leonid Osyka. Kyiv Frescoes, 1966 and The Stone Cross, director Leonid Osyka, 1968.
Duration 90 min.
Kyiv Frescoes. 13 min. In this rarely seen 13-minute short Serhii Paradzhanov experiments with a dramatically new style that scandalized the Soviet censors with its expressive audacity and departure from socialist realism prescriptions.
The Stone Cross. 77 min. A Galician peasant Ivan Didukh in a desperate attempt to get his family out of abject poverty decides to leave his ancestral home and seek a better life in Canada. Inspired by stories of the Ukrainian writer Vasyl Stefanyk (1871-1936), this film is Ukrainian poetic cinema at its best, terse and laconic in outward expression, but intensely psychological in the understated delivery of its message. Shot in a striking black-and-white, it brings to mind Akira Kurosawa. Today "Stone Cross" remains little known and even less appreciated both in and outside Ukraine. A true gem of world film art it is a peak of Ukrainian filmmaking that has no parallels.
This is a Canadian premier of the two recently restored and digitally remastered cinematographic masterpieces.
Nonverbal and in Ukrainian with English subtitles.
The screening is co-sponsored by the Canadian Foundation for Ukrainian Studies and the Ukrainian Film Club, Columbia University.
All films are with English subtitles. Free and open to the public.
For more information on Ukrainian films, go to the Ukrainian Film Club's website.
Past Lectures:
- Lecture Four: “A Ukrainian Despite Herself. The Cinema of Kira Muratova”
- Lecture Five: “Lecture Five”
- Lecture Six: “Language Wars in Ukrainian Cinema, The Triumphs and Defeats of Film Dubbing”
- Lecture Seven: "New Films and New Names from Ukraine"
- Lecture Eight: "Ukraine in the Focus of Spanish Filmmakers"
- Lecture Nine: "Revisiting Great Ukrainian Film Classics: Oleksandr Dovzhenko's Zvenyhora"
- Lecture Ten: "New Films from Ukraine"
- Lecture Eleven: "An Unknown Oleksandr Dovzhenko: Ivan (1932)"
- Lecture Twelve:The Great Famine in Film- "The Living"
- Lecture Thirteen: The Holocaust in Ukraine - Screening of "Spell Your Name" and a panel discussion
- Lecture Forteen: The Fourth Wave: Post-Soviet Ukrainian Emigration to the West
- Lecture Fifteen: Holodomor:Technology of Genocide
- Lecture Sixteen: Taras Bulba 2009
- Lecture Seventeen: Birds of Paradise 2008
- Lecture Eighteen: Bird Catcher and others
- Lecture Nineteen: PKP (Pilsudski Bought Petliura)
- Lecture Twenty: Assholes. Arabesques.
- Lecture Twenty One: White Bird with a Black Mark