HOMAGE TO UKRAINIAN CINEMA A survey of the strength of underappreciated national cinema and in recognition of the ongoing conflict and to honour the Ukrainian people as well as the country’s rich culture through the art of film. Some of them are a tough watch, but that only reflects the nation’s history. We present nine films from the silent classics of ‘Earth’ to recent releases like ‘Donbass’ and ‘Reflection’.
GENERAL INTRODUCTION BY MICHAEL BROOKE
Although Ukrainian cinema dates from as early as 1896, much of its history is intertwined with that of the Soviet Union, which (especially during the Stalin era) discouraged anything too overtly nationalistic. Despite this, several distinctively Ukrainian masterpieces were made a few years either side of 1930, and a post-Stalin national reflowering in the 1960s. The Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991 presented Ukrainian filmmakers with new creative freedoms but also considerable challenges, not least financial and logistical one. However, a distinctively independent Ukrainian cinema has nonetheless emerged, including the internationally acclaimed output of Sergei Loznitsa and striking individual works such as the sign-language ‘The Tribe’ (2014), the road movie ‘My Thoughts Are Silent’ (2019) and the post-apocalyptic ‘Atlantis’ (2019) – as well as several popular comedies starring the future Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whose widely recognised mastery of the media was honed during his previous career. M.B. Booking Ref
Wed 17 Aug 13:00 – Studio
FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS: THE HISTORY OF UKRAINIAN CINEMA
An illustrated talk by Michael Brooke Compared with Czech, Hungarian, Polish and Romanian cinema, Ukrainian cinema is far less familiar as a separate cultural entity, a legacy derived from it being collectively regarded as “Soviet cinema” for much of its lifespan. However, there have been plenty of Ukrainian film masterpieces, from Dziga Vertov’s ‘The Man with the Movie Camera’ and Oleksandr Dovzhenko’s ‘Earth’ at the close of the silent era, via the ground-breaking work of Sergei Parajanov and Kira Muratova, to the endlessly inventive fiction and documentary projects of Sergei Loznitsa (‘Donbass’) today. In this extensively illustrated talk, Eastern European film expert Michael Brooke delves into this fascinating, still underappreciated national cinema. Michael is a blu-ray producer and regular contributor to ‘Sight & Sound’ and the ‘Journal of Film Preservation’, specialising in East European Cinema. 100M BOX OFFICE
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