TALENT Marysia Nikitiuk

A PAINFUL PICTURE OF THE REALITY

Among the new wave of Ukrainian fi lmmakers, Marysia Nikitiuk has made one of the most striking debuts. Her 2018 drama When the Trees Fall, a harrowing yet poetic tale about the spiral of crime, generational oppression, and subjugation of women in the Ukrainian countryside, premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival.

By Andrei Liimets Photos by the Lucky Girl film team

“I don’t know how it’s going tobe after the war, but I hope we’ll find the courage to look at each other through art,” says Marysia Nikitiuk. It’s diffi cult not to start with the ongoing war. How have you been able to remain safe? At the moment, I’m so-so safe, staying in Ivano-Frankivsk in Western Ukraine. The city was bombed, and we have a lot of sirens here. I escaped from Kyiv on the 25th of February. There was a lot of traffi c, and the city was paralyzed. I didn’t want to go away, but my parents insisted that me and my boyfriend leave.

After that I stayed in a small village, which was interesting for a city girl. For the fi rst week we didn´t have anything, because there was one small shop which was completely bought empty. There was no cash because there were no vehicles to fi ll the bank automats. Then I got the feeling nothing would be like before, which was quite depressing. We tried to help the refugees and people coming to the small hostel where we were. In general, I felt quite useless though. I did what I know how to do – I fi lmed with my phone, talked to refugees, and I started to write poems in the third week to help myself psychologically.

Have you managed to get any work done, or is fi lm something you haven’t really thought about much? I’m fi nishing my second feature fi lm. We needed to fi nish the sound, but then the war started. We have our material in Lviv, and are looking into possibilities to fi nish the work in Poland or Germany.

During the fi rst days of the war, it seemed impossible to understand how one can make fi lms. You need to talk about this situation, about what has happened in Butcha, and Irpin, and all these people being raped and killed. You understand it will be needed to be rethought through art, but you are so shocked you can’t understand how this can be. Art is something that thrives on reality, but the reality is so damaging and cruel you can’t let it get inside you it all go through you.

I started writing poems and collecting some stories, and ideas, and points of view. I try to think about them, what to do with them after the war. There’s also the feeling that if you think about something after the war, you’re a traitor. I’m not a warrior. I love my job more than anything in the world, it’s something that gives me value for myself. But I know my fi lms don’t save lives and I feel bad.

When the Trees Fall deals with violence on multiple levels – physical violence, male violence, psychological violence between generations. Has making that fi lm and having thought about these topics helped you in any way understand the confl ict, and what drives the violence and hatred in people? We just had a free screening here, and I watched it for the fi rst time in over a year. And I cried, because compared to what’s happening now it seemed like a fairy tale.

I have had this feeling all my life that I am stressed by this echo of violence from the 1990s. My parents did a lot to keep me safe from the cruelty of this period, but I saw a lot of psychological violence among other families and my relatives. When I was a child, I was scared of how people can ruin their lives by themselves. That it’s part of a social order which you need to obey.

When I started to think about it more consciously, I understood that it came from the Soviet Union. What we see now in Russia is a return of the virus of Nazism and the totalitarian society. Of Lenin and

Stalin. We know how awful their repressions were. A genocide was carried out in Ukraine, most visible during the Holodomor in 1932 and 1933. My grandmother had two daughters and seven sons, and all the boys died during the famine.

After that they killed a lot of socially active people – writers, politicians, directors. You had to be very subservient. If someone seemed to be better than others, you could just write anonymously to the police, and they would be taken to the Gulag. Over the years, the national paradigm changed to the worse you are, the better you are. They raised a generation of people who thought violence is normal, that it is something that needs to exist in society.

When I was growing up, I didn’t know all that. I was scared of what I saw. Then I lived in Italy for a year when I was 10 years old, and I saw that a society could be normal. Back in Ukraine, I couldn’t wear colourful dresses because people would say you’re a freak, an idiot, a stupid girl, and that would be normal. This is the collective mental problem of the Ukrainian society, a present from the Soviet Union.

Step by step we have been trying to fix this. Very slowly for me, because I wanted to live in a European Ukraine 10 years ago, even 20 years ago. I wanted to be in this beautiful country that Ukraine can be, because we have a lot of beautiful people, a lot of ideas; compared to Russians we are more anarchic, we are not used to a totalitarian system. That’s why we fought Yanukovych and made huge steps to become a better society, that can make business honestly, and make films about what you want to.

When the Trees Fall is a film about these mental problems, and the post-Soviet way of changing people, making them become slaves.

Marysia Nikitiuk and Sergiy Mykhalchuk (DoP) and the film crew, on set of Lucky Girl.

Becoming homo sovieticus? Yes! My mother hated the Soviet Union so much that when I was small we didn’t even watch Soviet films, which were propaganda – ugly films about ugly men. My generation went quite far from this Soviet way of thinking, but the Russians went back. This is the main problem why we have a war now. They don’t want us to think in another way. But with war, they have made us think in another way much faster.

You studied international relations and theatre criticism. How and why did you end up in filmmaking? Quite accidentally. I have been writing since I was 13, and thought I was a Bukowski or a Virginia Woolf, because I was published as a teenager. I dreamed about becoming a writer, but we didn’t have normal universities, so I went into international journalism in 2003. At the time, there was very little freedom of expression in Ukraine, and journalists on TV received instuctions where it said what you had to say, and what you couldn’t.

I lost my romantic idea of journalism and was so depressed about this. Then I went to see a theatre play by the Lithuanian director Eimuntas Nekrošius, and I was astonished and shocked that someone could do these visual metaphors on a stage. I fell in love with theatre, and I went to study to become a theatre scientist, to analyse theatre. I worked for six years as a critic.

In film, there were very few scriptwriters, so they asked for texts from playwrights. That’s how I ended up in a workshop for short films. I started to write scripts for young directors, but I didn’t know much about how my texts became a film. I wasn’t very satisfied with

how I wrote one thing, and they made it into something else. I had a picture in my head, and it changed a lot. I was quite naïve and called a friend to tell him: oh my God, what have they made! And he said: come on, Marysia, shoot a short film yourself and then you’ll understand how directors work, and how a lot of stuff changes for different reasons. And I found that directing along with writing is something that makes me feel alive and happy.

When the Trees Fall is quite critical towards Ukrainian society, or at least some aspects of it. I know it was well received at various festivals but how was it received in Ukraine? It wasn’t received very well. We had trouble with distribution, and not many people watch art films. However, there was already a small arthouse audience, and they were engaged. I was afraid my mother would kill me because I used the name of her mother, but she liked it. But some of my relatives from outside Kyiv asked me why I showed Ukraine in a bad way. They thought the film was strange because of the dream scenes, and asked me if I take drugs. They’ve kept on calling my mum and asking if Marysia is okay, and if she’s not taking drugs anymore.

The problem with the audience in Ukraine is that after the fall of the Soviet Union, all the institutions that had helped make films closed. Some films were made in 90s out of inertia, but in general, cinemas were showing arthouse films we couldn’t see before. Then we started getting American and Chinese B-movies, and Ukrainian films pretty much stopped until 2011. We had a big gap in directing. The Ukrainian audience was adapted to see foreign films, action films about saving the world. People learned to go to the cinema not to discover what’s going on, but to see a fairy tale, to look away from the reality.

I don’t know how it’s going to be after the war, but I hope we’ll find the courage to look at each other through art. It’s a collective psychoanalysis for the society. You have to work with the mental body of a nation, otherwise you will fall into illusions like the Russians did about their great culture, great people, and saving others through genocide.

Marysia Nikitiuk on the set of Lucky Girl.

There’s been a huge increase in interest in Ukrainian culture. How would you describe the state of Ukrainian films before the war? We had a powerful bunch of directors and screenwriters coming through – Valentin Vasyanovitch, Nariman Aliev, Antonio Lukic, Marina Stepanska, and others. I could name 20 people who made their first features. They’ve painted a painful picture of the reality. Some have asked why it’s so tragic, why it’s not funnier. It was opposite to state propaganda which was taken from Russia. We were talking about painful and troublesome topics, mental traumas, and war. EF

Lucky Girl Marysia Nikitiuk graduated from Kyiv Karpenko-Karyi National University. She has been active as a scriptwriter since 2013. In 2014 Marysia started to shoot her own films as a director. Her first feature film When the Trees Fall premiered at 68th International Berlin Film Festival in the Panorama section in 2018. In 2019 the film Evge by Nariman Aliev, which Marysia co-wrote, premiered at Cannes Film Festival in the Un Certain Regard section.

Selected filmography as a director Lucky Girl (in postproduction) 2022 When the Trees Fall 2018 Rabies (short) 2016 Mandragora (short) 2016