On September 4 the film screenings “Echo of Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival,” organized by the Czech Center in Kyiv, began at Les Kurbas National Center of Theater Art.
Jihlava is a huge annual festival of documentary films held in the eponymous Czech town. Actually, the first film shown was about this town. It turned out to be not a standard local lore or historical film, but a short animated movie executed in a purposefully primitive manner (the characters and decorations are made of cardboard and paper and are demonstratively moved by hands), which in an ironic fashion tells some events from the history of Jihlava, shows the personality of outstanding Jihlava-born composer Gustav Mahler, and focuses mostly on fires which broke out mainly when people were baking doughnuts. Welcome to Jihlava was shot by Eva Bystrianska and Hynek Bernard.
The second film was quite long. This is The Pipeline by Russian Vitaly Mansky about the gas pipeline Urengoy – Pomary – Uzhhorod (which is also known as Druzhba / Friendship) about the lives of ordinary people who live in the areas it runs through. The picture was shot in a dreamy static atmosphere, but most of the scenes are quite dynamic. So, at first the screen shows the exotic landscapes of the far North, actually the gas deposits, the life of native people, provincial ceremonies, etc. An interesting thing is that often there is no gas in the populated centers on the screen. But there is a railway carriage-church which travels from one small station to another, where the touring priest baptizes and hears the confessions. One can see as well one of the oldest cities of Central Russia, where local, but dramatic story of detainment of the adherents of the local Communist Party at a very innumerous and boring celebration of Lenin’s birth anniversary. Finally, the film shows the village Tyotkine (former Ukrainian name Titchyn) on the Ukrainian-Russian border, in the part of Sloboda Ukraine which became Russian territory. After a concert when a touching orchestra is playing out of tune, its participants sit down at a table to discuss their political preferences.
Ukraine is shown very shortly in The Pipeline. One episode is celebration of May 9 in a small town in Chernihiv region. Its outstanding feature is the gas cylinder put under the Eternal Fire to keep it during the festivities and then taken out. Another episode is about unexpectedly dull life of a Roma neighborhood somewhere in Transcarpathia.
The geography of the film does not limit to symptomatically reduced Ukraine. It also shows an extremely ironic elderly Belarusian man. There are smiths from the Polish remote regions and a Czech crematorium worker. Finally, there are numerous scenes from Germany: the Cologne Carnival, a working day of a man who delivers gas cylinders with a dog, his faithful companion, an evening of an emigre from the Caucasus, and even a nostalgic festival, a meeting of the veterans of the gas pipeline construction with the song “Freundschaft – Friendship.” In spite of the Russian view, which was still present even in the movie which is very far from propaganda, the work turned out to be informative and visually interesting. And numerous awards it received at international festivals are proof of this opinion.
Next day the Kurbas Center showed Return to Adriaport by Adela Babanova (the Czech Republic) and Free Smetana! by Vit Klusak and Filip Remunda (the Czech Republic), and on September 6: Ukraine – One Poem by Jan Antonin Pitinsky (the Czech Republic, with participation of Yurii Andrukhovych), Thou Shalt Not Steal by Martina Malinova (the Czech Republic) and Normalization by Robert Kirchhoff (Slovakia, the Czech Republic).
During these days the photo exhibit “November ‘89” within the framework of the photo project “Czech crucial dates” was operating in the premises adjacent to the cinema. This is the Velvet Revolution in Prague through the eyes of Czech photographers, the material which is very understandable and topical in present-day Ukraine, because numerous parallels with our Maidan are more than evident. However, this material is no less actual (though in a different meaning) for today’s Czech Republic, taking into account the ambiguous responses to the Ukrainian events that come from this country.
