This festival was special in its own way, for it may be considered as a workshop seminar. The program of “Ukrayinski Alternatyvy” [Ukrainian Alternatives], which included screenings of legendary films, followed by discussions of plots and cast, was topped off by the publication of a voluminous theoretical work.
Oleksandr Rudkovsky, the creator and coordinator of the project, says that the first attempts to identify the national cinema in the Ukrainian context date from the mid-1990s. At the time, the Cinematographers Union first ventured on a series of projects combining domestic and foreign classical theme-oriented screenings, followed by roundtables. Among the guests were representatives of the Ukrainian humanities elite, among them filmmakers, writers, scientists, scholars, public and religious figures — people who could freely communicate and exchange ideas about the traditions and prospects of Ukrainian cinema. As noted on opening day, the aim of all these discussions was to identify aesthetic and social problems, whose solution would help revive the post-Soviet filmmaking process in Ukraine as an art acknowledged all over the world. In other words, our intellectuals’ brainstorming was focused on developing a theoretical model of the Ukrainian cinema. Such topics as History and Play; The Mystery of the Flesh: Prospects of Ukrainian Films on the Subject; The Outsider As an (Im)Possible Ukrainian Movie Hero; Horror As a Phenomenon of National Filmmaking Culture; and Mystic and Religious Movie Themes: Fantasy and Beliefs, were discussed during the first three festivals. Materials pertaining to those discussions have appeared in print as a two-volume edition entitled, respectively, Ukrainian Cinema: Identification in Time and Ukrainian Cinema: Euroformat (Alterpress, Kyiv, 2003).
The fourth “Ukrainian Alternatives” workshop festival was held to coincide with the Orthodox holiday of Vira, Nadiya and Liubov, and their Mother Sophia. It was dedicated to the enduring themes of love and hate, often manifested in acts of violence and terror — burning issues these days. September 11, already a cult movie, was the first to be screened. It combines eleven stories about the tragic events in the U.S. in 2001, made by eleven film directors from all over the world. New films were included in the program, among them recent classics like Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible, Bernardo Bertolucci’s Dreamers, and Oleksiy Rosych’s Oligarch.
The festival ended with a roundtable of experts discussing the theme of the current festival, Love and Terror: C’est la vie? It remains anyone’s guess what the organizers had in mind when they added the question mark — perhaps an unwillingness to put up with its banality? Actually, hope and the desire to challenge the inevitability of what is happening is rendered in French as Est-ce la vie? [Is this life?] Let’s hope that this idea will predominate in the upcoming third volume of materials on the work of the festival, which will appear in print under the title Ukrainian Cinema: Mustering the Courage.
