Efforts to revive Ukrainian national cinema by the most radical means continue. Last Thursday the project of a new film tentatively called The Kobzars was unveiled at Kyiv’s Cinepalace.
According to director Oles SANIN (of Mamai fame), the film is set in the most difficult times of Soviet Ukraine, the 1920s-1930s. The plot is based on the story of an American boy named Peter, who has moved to the Ukrainian SSR with his parents. The protagonist is destined to live through the entire nightmare of red terror: his father is killed, and Peter-turned-Petro becomes friends with the blind bandura player Ivan Kocherha, only to lose him in 1934, when the notorious “congress” of kobza and lyre players was convened in order to lure the musicians to their death.
The production kicks off to a start in May in New York and will be completed by late 2007. There are plans to release the movie in early 2008. Sanin is convinced that this will be a truly international project involving Hollywood, Polish, and Russian filmmakers, and British and American actors, while some scenes will be shot in such exotic countries as Mongolia.
There are plans to issue two language versions, Ukrainian and English, because the producers hope that foreign audiences will also see the picture. The director says that this is the first attempt to make a national film with good international prospects.
Sanin is not providing any details yet. As a matter of fact, distribution has always been the weakest link in the Ukrainian film industry. If the director’s statements are anything to go by, negotiations are taking place with distributors, but no one knows the chances of success.
The distributors’ stand will apparently depend on the quality of the film. The producers have raised generous funds for making the movie. The director claims that the budget is 14 million dollars, 10 of which come from one of Donetsk’s most powerful financial-industrial groups and the rest from the state. A Donetsk representative and Vice-Premier Vyacheslav Kyrylenko, both of whom attended the press conference, did not deny this claim.
Among the illustrious personalities involved in making this film are Serhiy Mikhalchuk, one of the best cameramen in Ukraine and the entire CIS; Anatoliy Kokush, general manager of Filmotechnik, winner of this year’s two “technical” Oscars (he designed the unique photographic equipment used on the sets of James Cameron’s Titanic and Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds); and Peter Borisow, president of the Hollywood Trident Foundation.
The American actor of Ukrainian descent Jack Palance (Volodymyr Palahniuk), the chairman of the foundation, Hollywood veteran, and Best Supporting Actor Oscar winner in 1993, has confirmed his participation in the film.
In other words, everything seems to be ready for making a breakthrough into the “top cinema league.” All we have to do is make proper use of this.
And, finally, a quotation from the memoirs of the great composer Dmitry Shostakovich, recorded by Solomon Volkov for the book Testimony:
“...national art was considered ‘counterrevolutionary.’ But why? Because, like any other ancient art, it was religious and cult-oriented. And if it is religious, uproot it! I hope someday someone will write the story of how great folk art was destroyed in the 1920s and 1930s. The intention was to wipe it out forever because this is oral art. When a folk singer or a wandering story-teller is shot, this also destroys many hundreds of great musical works that nobody has ever recorded. They are destroyed for good, irreversibly, because a different singer means different songs. I am not an historian. I could tell a lot of tragic stories and give a lot of examples, but I will not. I will only recount one case — just one. A terrible story indeed. Whenever I recall this story, I feel scared. I wish I hadn’t recalled it.
“Since time immemorial, singers had always roamed throughout Ukraine. They were called lyre and bandura players. They were almost always blind. Why they were blind is a special question. I am not going to dwell on this now. I will only say briefly: it was a tradition. Look: those people were blind and defenseless, but nobody had ever harmed or hurt them. For what can be more shameful than hurting someone who is blind? So it was announced in the mid-1930s that the First All-Ukrainian Congress of Lyre and Bandura Players would be held ostensibly to enable these folk singers to get together and discuss what to do in the future, when, as Stalin said, ‘life will be better and more cheerful.’
“And the blind men believed this. They dragged themselves to their first congress from all over Ukraine, from small God-forsaken villages. There were quite a few of them — some say about several hundred. This was a living museum, a living history of the country: all its songs, all its music and poetry. Almost all of them — those hapless blind people — were shot.
“Why was this done? Why this sadism: slaughtering the blind? Just for the hell of it, so that they wouldn’t be underfoot. You see, this was a time of great milestones, like the total collectivization of farms, the destruction of kulaks as a social class, etc. And now some blind fellows! They are walking around and singing songs of suspicious content. The songs were not censored. Can there be any censorship if a man is blind? You can’t put a revised and blue-penciled text before a blind man’s eyes. Nor can you write him an order on a piece of paper. A blind man must be told everything by word of mouth, which will take too much time! And in this case you cannot attach a piece of paper to his ‘case record.’ And there’s no time because there is collectivization, mechanization, etc., going on. It’s easier to shoot them. And they were shot.
“This is just one of many similar stories. But I have already said that I am no historian. I just want to tell you what I know very well — too well, perhaps. I know that when all this is duly researched, when all the facts are gathered and corroborated by relevant documents, the people responsible for this villainy will have to be brought to justice, at least for the sake of our descendants. If you don’t believe in this at all, what’s the use of living?” (Web site of Nizhny Novgorod University, Russia.)
If the film’s producers succeed in depicting the profundity and pain of this tragedy, they will achieve genuine recognition, which is more precious than any awards.
