INTERVIEW: Canadian film maker Paskievich speaks on "My Mother's Village" (05/20/01)

INTERVIEW: Canadian film maker Paskievich speaks on "My Mother's Village"

MONTREAL - Well-known Canadian film maker, John Paskievich is just completing the final touches on a film titled "My Mother's Village." Born in 1947 in a displaced persons camp in Linz, Austria, Mr. Paskievich immigrated to Canada with his family as a young child. He graduated from the University of Winnipeg, and later studied film and photography at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in Toronto.

Mr. Paskievich's work includes such award-winning documentaries as "Ted Baryluk's Grocery," "The Old Believers," "The Actor," "If Only I Were an Indian," "Sedna: The Making of a Myth" and "The Gypsies of Svinia."

Mr. Paskievich has also published several critically acclaimed books of photographs, among them "A Voiceless Song" and "A Place Not Our Own." He was recently in Montreal working on his film, and this interview was conducted at that time by Fran Ponomarenko.

Prof. Ponomarenko teaches in the English department at Vanier College, Montreal.

Q: This past year we saw the publication of Lubomyr Luciuk's "Searching for Place," a study that deals with the migration of memory, examines the social and political conditions in which displaced persons found themselves after the war, and outlines their difficult trek to Canada and the United States. Now you have just finished a film that also touches on the subject of DPs. What aspect of the DP experience does your film, "My Mother's Village," address?

A: My film addresses, or attempts to address, the experiences not of the adult parents who immigrated to Canada but the experiences of their children and what it meant to grow up with one foot in the world of their parents - an East European world - and one foot in a North American world. I wanted to look at what it meant going back and forth between worlds, and the tensions that it may have caused or the special oblique ways of looking at things that a lot of the DP children, who are now adults, have.

Q: Why do you feel it is important to document this?

A: I think it is important because it has never been documented. This experience of growing up in two worlds is a dramatic one; it's filled with all kinds of crises, humor, anecdotes. It's a fascinating journey to explore two worlds simultaneously, it is a gift and a burden in a way because you are always looking at things from two sides, either consciously or unconsciously. lt's always happening.

Q: How did you go about selecting the people you interviewed in the film? After all, there are thousands of DP children who are now adults.

A: Yes, there are thousands of them. They range in psychologies, too. And so I was looking for individuals who would be able to articulate their experience. I found that people who were artists were ideal for what I wanted to do. Whether it's a writer or a photographer, artists work from an interior life and are continuously confronting an exterior life that has or doesn't have an echo with their interior one.

I am not trying to negate the experiences of other people, say someone who is involved in volunteer work or some other work. They are valuable for what they do. Neither do I want to negate those who have cut themselves off from the Ukrainian community.

It's true that to a certain degree I found individuals who echoed my own experiences.

Q: The subjects you touch on - identity, memory and personal history - require people to reveal intimate aspects of themselves. What was your experience with interviewees in this connection?

A: I found that to be the hardest thing about the whole project because any question that I would ask would always have a personal note. You grow up in a family and all the experiences are related to that family, so a lot of people who were excellent declined to be interviewed because they wished to keep their family experiences private. Many of their stories I have heard before, or I experienced similar ones in my family, or in the families of my friends.

You know, I do talk about the Ukrainian notion of 'styd' or "What will people think?" in my film. This preoccupation is common amongst Ukrainians: "Oh, what will people say? Movchy. Liudy budut hovoryty." But people know everything anyway; we live in a village. I don't want to belabor this point, this isn't what the film is about.

Q: The setting for your film is both Ukraine and Canada. Why did you need to go to Ukraine - the DPs are in the diaspora?

A: I went to Ukraine because this film is about memory, and as Faulkner said: "There is no such thing as was, there is only is." What happened over there, either at the hands of the Bolsheviks, the Nazis or the Poles carries on happening for us DPs and remains with us our whole lives. History is always with us. The more your parents experience history the more it is happening in the now.

Q: I agree, our parents could never eradicate what they experienced, but we their children did not physically live through those Stalinist and Hitlerite nightmares even though we lived with these traumatized parents. And so their agony became transmitted to us psychologically and we are, therefore, also marked. But could you comment on some specific ways or in what sense you see our history active in the present?

A: In all senses, you just have to look at the DPs, and here I mean the parents, talk to them, observe how they behave and live their lives, how they react to situations and to institutions. The DPs, the parents, have all kinds of behaviors, such as weeping and crying, which are the result of trauma, nightmares, fears and anxieties.

If you grow up with this you wonder where this is coming from, and you feel that you want to find out and this takes a long time. Living with traumatized parents means that you are always anticipating their odd behavior, or trying to understand them, or being ashamed of them, or rejecting them. The whole thing only has any meaning once you put it into a context and that means examining the history.

That is why I went to Ukraine and filmed over there. I interviewed people in Ukraine who had the exact same experiences as the DPs. I talked to people about the Famine-Genocide, about the Polish occupation, as well as the Nazi and Communist ones, all those things. They lived it over there, and our parents lived it over there and then they came here. Speaking to folks over there was like speaking to people here; it was all a shared and common history.

Q: What were the differences, if any, in the way our parents' generation here in the West and there in Ukraine approach the memory of our history?

A: In Ukraine I felt much more fatalism, over here, how can I describe it? Because the people in Ukraine stayed at home they still have a sense of rootedness, continuity and extended family, but here the DPs were disconnected, severed from their home and thus left with a wound. And if the wound is not open anymore, there is still a scar of being separated forcibly from your home, your language, your family members and your whole life.

Q: What was the reaction of folks in the Ukrainian village where you stayed to the film crew? Did you have any hardships while filming?

A: People in Ukraine were very open. They wanted the world to know that they existed and that what happened to them really did take place. They weren't at all shy; they felt they had a voice now. We were there Christmas before last, in 1999, and we spent three weeks filming. It was a cold snowy winter that year. Our crew went back and forth on sleighs across fields, and once our sleigh tipped over and we almost wrecked our gear and almost got hurt. It's a hard life there.

Q: I understand that the people on the crew had some Ukrainian connections. ls that correct? What were their reactions to life in Ukraine?

A: They were third-generation Ukrainians, and each had one grandparent who was Ukrainian. Well, they were very shocked at the bad economic conditions - the roads, the lack of proper heating, the sewers which are all in a state of disrepair. Ukraine is in Europe, they thought, so how can it be that bad? But when they actually got there, I am talking about the rural areas, they were shocked.

For instance, in the town of Rava Ruska there is a stretch of road that has thousands of meter-wide pot holes, and all the vehicles go round and round these pot holes at five miles an hour. These types of situations can be multiplied hundreds of times over. Rava Ruska has approximately the same population as Oshawa, but the buildings are heated mostly with wood, a little coal but coal is too expensive. There is no running water in town, it's all well water. Of course, in the villages there are only outhouses, and no running water whatsoever.

Q: From the title of the film, 'My Mother's Village," is it fair to say that most of the Ukrainian footage is from your mother's place of birth?

A: The filming was done in the area of my mother's village. In the actual village, in a neighboring village because that is where the main church is. We also filmed in Rava Ruska, which is where all the people go to market.

Q: What are the chances of showing this film in Ukraine, and are you going to be doing subtitles in Ukrainian?

A: I need money to do that, so I am working on that now. I have talked to some people in Ukraine who have contacts with the TV and film industry in Lviv. They think it would be a good idea to show it on TV or else in a theatre, but you know how much market there is for documentaries So, I don't know. Perhaps it could be shown in a university. Culture there is not a priority, economics is. Therefore, everything takes longer and very often you still have to follow a very circuitous path because old ways die hard.

Q: The making of a film like the writing of a novel often provides unexpected insights. Have you come to any conclusions or ideas about the whole DP condition that you did not have at the outset?

A: Yes, I am a lot more accepting and at peace with the whole experience of growing up the son of DPs and being a DP myself. I have been back in Ukraine about six times, it was always a very intensive experience. I read a lot on this subject, I interviewed in one way or another about 100 people, perhaps more, and after a while certain perceptions and thoughts took a real and concrete form. I no longer find things as frightening or anxiety-provoking.

Q: What you are talking about has to do with the excessive abuse that our parents had to endure, and the immigration experience must be added into all this too. The cataclysm of genocide, deportation, execution and later world war resulted in the disintegration of the physical and psychological world of millions of Ukrainians. Many could never reassemble that shattering, many suffered all kinds of post-traumatic disorders. With abuse that is so deep, so intense, how could the DPs and their children be any other way? Our parents were very injured and very hurt people. All things considered, don't you think it is a miracle that we Ukrainians manage as well as we do?

A: Yes, absolutely.

Q: Where will the premiere of your film be held?

A: It's hard to say. If it is accepted at a major festival like Toronto, then there, or maybe Montreal. It's too early to say; a lot depends on what the critical reception will be. One hopes that it will be shown in as many venues as possible, ranging from film festivals to TV.

Q: I understand that you have already screened the film at the National Film Board in front of a diverse group of about 50 people, primarily non Ukrainians. What was their reception?

A: In general, the audience at our test screening responded very well to the film. There was a segment of the audience, however, those on the political left, who continue to act as apologists for communism. They refuse to believe that what happened in the Soviet Union was a crime against humanity on a par with the crimes of the Nazis.

To criticize communism forces these apologists to examine their dearly held "progressive" notions and this they are reluctant to do. But I have heard all this cant and denial many times before and over the years, so it came as no big surprise.

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