A teaser to the film Sweet Darusia has been shown at the movie theater Kyiv this week. Sweet Darusia is a screening of an eponymous novel written by Maria Matios. The launch of the movie project coincided with the tenth anniversary of the book’s release in Ukraine. The film is directed by Lviv-based Oleksandr Denysenko, a pupil of the legendary Polish film director Andrzej Wajda. Ms. Matios says that two years ago in a cafe of a Kyiv supermarket he dared say that he would be the one to shoot Sweet Darusia. And he was right. The film is receiving huge funding. It will be released under the patronage of Petro Poroshenko and with the assistance of the minister of culture of Ukraine, the Klitschko Foundation, and Andrzej Wajda Film Studio. However, the shooting has not received any governmental funding, according to the organizers.
The invitees saw only eight minutes of the future film. There are more foreign actors on screen than Ukrainian ones. The chosen scenes are the most emotional, like the one when NKVD agents entered the house of Darusia’s parents and she unwillingly admits the cooperation of her father with the guerillas; another scene shows Darusia’s mother hang herself on her own braid; there is a scene when the village is on fire; grown-up Darusia digs herself in the ground or goes under a waterfall. These strokes give a feeling of another epic film picture of Ukrainian tragic history.
THEY TALKED NOT ONLY OF LOFTY MATTERS, BUT ALSO OF FINANCES – EVERYBODY WONDERED “TO WHAT EXTENT OF THE POCKET’S DEPTH” VITALI KLITSCHKO WILL SUPPORT THE PROJECT
The youngest “Darusia” Solomia Dymytrashchuk was among the audience. She came with her mother. “The shooting took place during the autumn vacations,” says the young actress. “When I came back to school, everyone was eager to see the film, but that was only the beginning. It was cold to participate in shooting in winter. I had to wear old-time clothes and wooden shoes, which were somewhat too tight. I see Darusia as a clever child, but it turned out so that she became an orphan. That was the first time I took part in a movie, and I want to be an actress.”
The teaser of the film was supposed to be presented for the audience last summer, but according to Matios, she slowed down the process of the launch because of her moral convictions during the war. “The first scenes when Darusia enters the water in Mykulynets stream in Ivano-Frankivsk region were shot back in the first days of October 2013, when the surrounding hills started to get covered with snow. The episodes of deportation and burning of the village were shot on December 23, when Maidan was solid as stone,” says Maria Matios.
THE TEAM OF PRODUCERS, OLEKSANDR YANCHUK, OLEH KOKHAN, AND ROMAN BALAIAN (LEFT TO RIGHT), CAME TO ASSESS THE WORK OF THEIR COLLEAGUES
The process of shooting Sweet Darusia was difficult, because it was taking place during the clashes in Maidan. The last scene in the teaser, the wedding of Matronka and Mykhailo, was shot on January 26, 2014 in Lviv. “I didn’t come to the shooting then, because at that time I was trying to see the arrested Maidan activists in Obolon District Court, and I managed to do this. Polish actor Piotr Glowacki, who was going to the shooting in Lviv, got stuck in a traffic jam, because tires were burnt on the road, but finally they let him pass. Sometimes Sweet Darusia opened the doors I would never been able to open myself.”
The shooting is underway, and at the moment the filmmakers cannot tell the official release date. “The story of Sweet Darusia is a triumph of a person who, in spite of an incredible burden of the tragic past, could free herself from mental slavery, the subconscious feeling of guilt,” says the director of the film Oleksandr Denysenko. “This story is a shining ray of hope for Ukraine, the hope that at some point of time it will get free from the imprisonment of the past and become a modern nation.”
