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. All films are in Ukrainian with English subtitles.
Following the tradition of bringing the newest and best in contemporary Ukrainian filmmaking, the November 22 presentation by the Ukrainian Film Club of Columbia University at U-of-T will showcase "Ukraine in the Focus of Spanish Filmmakers". The program presents the recent and never before screened in Canada film: The Unnamed Zone by Carlos Rodriguez.
Featured Films:
1. The Unnamed Zone, director Carlos Rodriguez, 2006, 80"
A Spanish film crew is following the stories of three young Ukrainians directly affected by the worst nuclear disaster in human history at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Station which occurred on April 26, 1986. Three children – Lidia Pidvalna, Anastasia Pavlenko, and Andriy Kovalchuk – and their families living perilously close to the exclusion zone around the destroyed station recount their fears, dreams, fantasies, and hopes for the future. There is a palpable sense of despair in this cinematographic trip to ‘the heart of one of the world’s most disturbing places: Chornobyl and its surrounding area contaminated with radiation and still inhabited by some five million people. These people have basically been forgotten and abandoned by their own government, Ukrainian society, and the rest of the world. Chornobyl looms large in their lives not only as a terrible memory, and a never-receding fear of a radiation-induced terminal illness that can occur at any moment, but as a nightmare that is bound to return if the neglected sarcophagus hastily constructed around the core of the fourth reactor, with huge mass of highly radioactive materials inside, is allowed to continue to disintegrate.
All the films are in Ukrainian with English subtitles. Introducing the films and mediating the post-screening Q-and-A will be Dr. Yuri Shevchuk, lecturer of Ukrainian language and culture and the founding director of the Ukrainian Film Club of Columbia University.
Past lectures:
- Lecture One: “Oxygen Starvation: The Defeated Expectation of Freedom”
- Lecture Two: “The Little Engine That Could: Ukrainian Documentary Cinema”
- Lecture Three: “Language and Identity in Contemporary Ukrainian Film”
- 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"