The Palme d’Or of the Cannes Festival is the highest cinematographic award. This year the Ukrainian film director Maryna Vroda won the short films contest with her 15-minute film The Cross Country.
In 2003 Maryna shot her first black and white short film I’m Sorry telling about the thirst for motherhood. Since then she’s been honing her skills with every new film. Her films are psychological stories in which everyone is right but no one knows the absolute truth, just like in the black and white The Family Portrait (2006-09). With equally great talent Vroda tells the moving (yet not sentimental) story about the love epic of an old man and woman in The Rain (2007) and creates the holistic and bright miniature about the end of the childhood (The Vow, 2007). Finally, Cross Country is a deep and mature work about loneliness, growing up and the dangerous taste for liberty. During one morning a teenager, one of those who shirk phys-ed classes, learns about expulsion, sees death and, finally, bet and rejected by his peers finds himself in an amazing paradise where his classmates are running the senseless cross country race on one side of the river and the carefree adults are having fun on the other; in the middle, in the water there’s a half-naked boy rolling in the transparent ball who is either the same pariah, the same pighead or the visible symbol of the future awaiting the hero.
We met Maryna The Day after she came back to Ukraine.
First of all, I’d like to congratulate you, as a film critic and viewer, and also on behalf of The Day’s readers.
“Thank you.”
When did you feel that you’re a cinematographer?
“I remember coming to my friend’s exam at Karpenko-Kary University. It was an ordinary exam when students played some fragments. It impressed me a lot: a small room, the wooden floor and green curtains; they played something unprofessionally yet very sincerely. I realized then that I would come back there and I did a year later. I completely realized that it’s mine when we were making the first film I’m Sorry in 2003. I knew every scene of the film and when we were shooting it with my camerawoman Olena she was concerned and said: ‘How will we shoot without the tripod, how will we fly?’ and I needed the camera to move lightly and fly up to the sheets on the rope. We wasted the first day since we shot with the tripod. Then we sat down, thought it over and I said: ‘Throw the tripod away.’ We even used the symbols: in the last scene of the film the woman wrapped into a sheet is standing by the window and the man is listening to her belly under the sheet, she strokes his head and hears children laughing in the street; it was a school sketch, yet very important for us. Later I looked at the window and saw the ambulance and a real pregnant woman was coming out of the building, she was probably going to deliver a baby and it was just an amazing coincidence. I remember it very well. Then I did my best and realized that it was mine.”
You have grown into a film director since then. However, regardless of all the unfavorable conditions, luck seems to have been an important component of your success in Cannes: you met Florence Keller, your friend and energetic producer...
“She believed in me at once and gave me a part of the money needed for the filming and continued searching for the money for postproduction: copy printing and the final dubbing was done for French funds… Yet it seems to me that it wasn’t luck. I believe I would have met somebody anyway. I would have done it with her or without. She also wanted to start, she just opened a company and it was just a coincidence: two people who wanted the same at the same time. She understood that she could benefit from it as a producer. On the one hand it was a coincidence, on the other hand it wasn’t. I can imagine that I will find today 10 interesting directors with their projects in the Karpenko-Kary University, it’s just a question whether producers see them or not. Everyone wants to have stars at once. I would have finished Cross Country with my friends anyway. We were ready for a failure with the film and the festival from the very beginning, but we wanted to do it. We finished it. It was our essential achievement. The fact that we won is good... That’s it.”
You’ve achieved success with a minimal participation of your home country. Does one need a formal education taking into account that many successful directors manage without it?
“I don’t have the definite answer. Personally I like the communication in the studio. It’s a unique possibility to find some space, to talk to someone — I remember choking in the school, I had some ideas but didn’t have anyone to talk to. At home nobody understands you. When you come here you understand that you’re a friend. The people here have the same disease. They understand you. I’m talking about the personal contact with the masters. It’s a road [you go down], you don’t just learn how to make a film.”
Is it like a director’s Dao?
“I needed my peers, we felt a spiritual contact and gave a lot to each other. My master Valerii Syvak never told me what to do and how to do it. If I came to him to ask questions he first of all listened to me and then took a couple of books from the shelf and gave them to me saying: ‘Here, read them, then you’ll come again and we’ll talk.’ If one had questions they were given a book, a film or a disk. It was a certain exchange. Then we just talked. Those conversations were a gift, they’re priceless. He gave us all his life. He lived in his students.
“It all was a self-education, too. However, I can’t imagine not going anywhere, not talking to people or not seeing anything. For me the institute was the only place where one could see something, find out something about Robert Bresson whose films taught me lots of things, by the way. There’s nothing else, just a vacuum. If we had a space where they would make films all the time like in Paris we would gather and develop. But the only possibility to find some space and talk to somebody is the institute. I wouldn’t have believed in myself otherwise. I met friends and like-minded people there. Valerii Syvak is an absolutely amazing person; I was ready to come to that school for a second time only because of him. Probably, Western film directors live in an absolutely different space.”
They live in a very dense cultural environment.
“Probably.”
What’s the background of your films?
“My childhood, my dreams, my yard, my relations with neighbors, friends and that life in the Kyiv outskirts in Bortnychi where I grew up. People from all over the USSR came there to work after [their education]; they received flats and had babies. We were those babies, the people of my age and those who were younger. It was a happy and bitter life. I know everything well there and there I’m a friend.”
As far as I understand, the idea of Cross Country emerged from your childhood, from your memories about running at the lessons of phys-ed?
“Yes, we had the standard time. I remember our teachers. All of them were from the Soviet times and despite the USSR had collapsed they still educated us in the same spirit.”
For me physical education was a traumatic experience.
“I really liked it. I liked running and hanging on bars. The teacher of physical education liked me a lot, unlike the maths teacher. However, running is just a form. The direct push was something else. We were just walking. In the park I saw a lake and someone in a ball. This person ran in the ball on the water and others were relaxing on the beach. I thought it was madness. The ball, the water, and they paid for this as for amusement. Everything coincided: the cross country, the ball and running… Yet Cross Country is not about my childhood, its time is broken, you can’t say that it happens only today. At the beginning there’s a tram, one doesn’t understand where it is, what kind of travel in space it is that reminds of the Soviet times when everybody goes in a rank, but at the same time the men are sitting at the fire, now they do it everywhere and I tried to unite everything in this holistic picture.”
Did you find your amateur actors there in Bortnychi?
“Yes, it turned out that the guys from the street, from ordinary families are closer to me. The most interesting thing for my film: if they strive for something they always have a glimmer. It was easy for me to get along with Yehor, the boy who played the leading role. He has something that characterizes him as a personality, something hidden from others, I knew it and didn’t touch it. He’s an ordinary kid and extraordinary at the same time. He has no idea about it. Probably, it determined my choice. It’s always very interesting for me to work with children and teenagers, it brings some ease. They quickly get tired especially if they get bored, though. They won’t repeat anything twice. You need to do your best when making a take. The next one will be different.”
Beginner directors often prefer elderly actors as they have the whole story on their faces…
“It’s not easier. I like different faces, the essential thing is to have something to create a portrait. Then we talk. If we have a contact we continue working together.”
Have you tried working with professional actors?
“In The Family Portrait I worked with Stas Boklan. I feared I would have to explain something, to motivate him, but it turned out that I said one phrase and he got it. Working with him was easy, he did everything. It depends on the task. For example, there are professional actors in the film Twenty Days without War by Aleksey German, but how did he manage to show them the way that one can’t see that they’re actors! Probably, I lack experience to say what the difference is. However, we need the real life in the film and not its imitation and it doesn’t matter who plays. First I had the idea to invite children from the actor school for Cross Country. They are great but I was looking for something else. All of them are trained to produce results. Why am I talking about Cross Country, about the school, where all of us were trained for something? I need a free actor. Amateur actors are absolutely disinterested whether they will be shown or not, they are more independent and there’s another human exchange with them. When this exchange is successful, the film and every scene are successful. This is what I’m looking for.”
What films seem to you to be the closest to perfection?
“We were taught that the essential is to tell the expressive story, this is the ABC of our profession. Otherwise, what’s the use of one’s skill if one can’t rule it? I’ve never had just stories. There has to be something in between the lines, something that can’t be retold, an image. It’s always risky to believe the idea and it’s always difficult to do something on your own. I might know the story, the beginning, the middle and the end, but if I didn’t feel it, it won’t work. The author dies in the script, the script dies in the film and the film dies in the audience: as for me, this is an ideal formula. I’m responsible only for my part.”
I was under the impression that Cross Country is a film about growing up, the author’s one as well.
“Yes, these are the questions to me. I think I finished with them.”
Being a director is a tough work. What invigorates you?
“It seems to me that I improve as a person when making films, at least at the moment when I do it. I do the inner work, sometimes one that is grandiose and it makes me closer to something. This joy probably invigorates me.”
