On February 13 the House of Cinematographers in Kyiv hosted the premiere of Oles Sanin’s documentary Hrikh (Sin). Both the eloquent title and theme (“This film is my final exam before Leonid Osyka, my teacher. It is about the long history of a sin perpetrated against one’s native land and its atonement.”) made one expect an overstatement, superfluously emotional, with a tragic voice reading the text off-screen. Sanin’s proved an altogether different approach. The text was recorded in a whisper, transforming emotion into revelation.
IN BRIEF
Sin is about Leonid Osyka and the way he worked on his Stone Cross in the onsite phase at the village of Rusiv. The film was based on Vasyl Stefanyk’s short story and one scene was a burial service. Osyka talked the local parish priest into performing such a service in the absence of a corpse, which is a grave sin under canon law. No doubt, the film director agreed to take it on himself. Thus emerged one of the masterpieces of the Ukrainian cinema, with practically all Rusiv’s villagers playing extras. “I wanted to show the Stone Cross at the Stefanyk Club, on the collective farm named for the author. A whole generation has grown up there without seeing Osyka’s picture,” Sanin said before starting on the documentary. Every villager knows about Ivan Artemiychuk who erected a stone cross on his native land before immigrating to Canada, and they all remember stories about the film crew and on-site shooting, now almost a legend.
STRONGLY
Even a professional would be hard put to distinguish between scenes from Osyka’s movie and documentary scenes shot by Sanin’s cameraman Serhiy Mykhalchuk, except for small details caught by the camera in his skilled hands: signs of modern times; while the Hutsul costumes (used in the legendary movie) are still in mothballs, the faces are no longer lit by naive inspiration, something you never see now.
Yuri Ilyenko, another great Ukrainian film director, said after the premiere, “It would be hard to find another production as good as Osyka’s brilliant picture, yet the documentary scenes shot by Mykhalchuk and directed by Sanin seem a good match, simply because they tell us the same story about people before and after committing a sin, and I mean people, not just a man.”
TERRIBLE
“A real Ukrainian tragedy is not some conflict involving so many individuals or an existentialist wandering through the labyrinth of his own ego. Primarily, it is the conflict of a man with a strong sacral force and myth. Ancestors, land, home — these are the real values. Disregarding them as the basis of this conflict renders such masterpieces of the Ukrainian cinema as the Stone Cross nonsense. Unless one understands this, one cannot enact the Ukrainian variation of ‘To be or not to be?’” This is how Oles Sanin explains not only the main prerequisite in perceiving the film, but also something more important which must be explained today and which did not seem to require any explanation yesterday: So what kind of sin was committed? An old horse stumbles on a rocky field to the accompaniment of an old Cossack march, dragging a plow, perhaps the same one worked by Ivan Artemiychuk. Two steps and a boulder, another step and another boulder. The music is interrupted. The tempo is too quick. The plow cannot make a furrow that quickly. Sanin recalls a lesson he learned from his teacher: “Always listen to the voice of the angel on your shoulder.” The closing phrase in the documentary (I am not sure I am conveying it verbatim): “I came to Rusiv to hear the angel’s voice. I heard only his whisper.” And the closing scene: a badly sick Leonid Osyka studying videotapes.
