Ukraine's cinema industry faces its moment of truth (08/25/02)

Ukraine's cinema industry faces its moment of truth

by Conor Humphries
Special to The Ukrainian Weekly

KYIV - After over a decade in the doldrums, the Ukrainian cinema industry is facing its moment of truth as a domestically financed film is being prepared for widespread domestic distribution for the first time in a decade.

"A Prayer for Hetman Mazepa," a surrealistic historical epic by the well-regarded Ukrainian director Yurii Illienko has already sparked controversy - and more seems inevitable - as the world gets its first real glimpse at a post-Soviet Ukrainian cinematic product and taxpayers get a chance to see what their $2 million have been spent on.

"Its a film of genius," stated Mykola Mashenko, director of Kyiv's Dovzhenko Studio, describing the legendary film factory's latest and most expensive production. "Of course, some people will like it and others won't. But I'm delighted that a paper like Moscow's Izvestia said that it was a picture of genius."

Speaking in his enormous office in the administrative building of the studio, Mr. Mashenko has no shortage of superlatives to describe Mr. Illienko's historical epic, whose budget of 12 million hrv (almost $2.1 million U.S.) represents the government's biggest investment in Ukraine's crumbling film infrastructure since independence. Placing it on par with undisputed classics such as Dovzhenko's "Earth" and Paradjanov's "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors," he included it on his list of the 20 films in the studio's 75-year history that have reached the level of high art.

Russian cinema critics, however, have, been less generous with their superlatives. Aside from the above-mentioned Izvestia critic, the reactions from Moscow following a showing of the film at the recent Kinotavr festival in Sochi were negative, to put it politely. Objecting in equal measure to its surrealist style and its negative portrayal of Peter the Great - shown at one point raping a soldier - the Russian critics dismissed it as incomprehensible.

"The 'Prayer' presents itself as a particular type of masterpiece of provincial surrealism, and there is nothing even almost understandable in it," wrote Moscow's Novaya Gazeta, while the Vremya television program noted that the majority of the audience at Sochi left well before the end of the film.

On the other hand, a Polish film festival held near Szczeczin awarded the Ukrainian film its grand prize, picking it over 26 other international entries.

However biased the Russian reaction, the success or failure of the film when it is finally released in September will act as a litmus test for the state of the Ukrainian film industry. Few of the six or seven feature films produced in Ukraine annually are seen by more than a handful of insiders and, if widely distributed as planned, "Mazepa" will be the first glimpse by many into Ukraine's cinema industry in over a decade.

One Kyiv native who sees the film's shortcomings as typical of the problems in the industry is Andrei Levchenko, artistic director of the 1999 foreign-financed, Oscar-nominated production "East-West" - one of the most widely distributed films made in Ukraine in the last decade. Mr. Levchenko sees the surrealist style as self-indulgent.

"What they are calling new - it's not new, it's just a lack of responsibility in relation to representation," he stated, before apologizing for his negative attitude. "I look on it with an ironic smile, not because I'm indifferent, but because I'm not indifferent at all."

For Mr. Levchenko, the general lack of resources is the obvious problem faced by Ukrainian cinema, a situation that is accentuated by the control that the government continues to have over the industry because it remains the only real source of financial resource for the money-strapped industry.

"If you want the level of cinema to rise there needs to be investment, so the government loses its aesthetic control," explained Mr. Levchenko.

Volodymyr Votenko, editor of Kino-Kolo, a quarterly Ukrainian film magazine, agreed and claimed that government control is holding back new talent with its insistence on big-budget historical epics.

"The government only gives these large amounts of money to directors who have proven themselves, and they are inevitably from the older generation," he noted, "and for the most part they are working with the same bureaucrats they were working with during the Soviet Union."

For Mr. Mashenko, it is the lack of government control that is having the more negative effect on the industry, which has not yet become acclimatized to the post-censorship world in which it is operating.

"We have had 10 years of an uncensored, free creative process, with nobody controlling it - not the studio director, not the ministry, no one," remarked Mr. Mashenko. "Occasionally, however, we confuse creative freedom with an absence of responsibility for what we do. We need to be able to decide whether or not our audience needs something without the aid of censorship."

Government control remains because there is an almost total lack of investment in the industry from other sources, with an array of problems holding back potential investors from putting in their money. Enormous taxes, for example, mean that as much as 50 percent of an investment goes to the state budget.

There is also no provision for private distribution of films made in the big studios, which would allow private enterprises to invest money in marketing films. Although the market has shrunk enormously since the days when cinema receipts were second only to vodka as money generators for the Soviet government, the video market still holds large potential for distributors.

In Russia, where the industry has faced similar problems to its Ukrainian counterpart in acclimatizing to the market economy, government changes in taxation and distribution have led to significant growth. This year as many as 50 feature films will be produced in Russia - 20 of them by first-time directors.

One thing that Ukrainian cinema has undoubtedly gained, however, is freedom, and Mr. Mashenko is determined to take full advantage of it to tell the stories that the Soviets wouldn't stand for. Currently, he is personally directing the first segment of a new film about Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky, the leader of the Ukrainian Kozak state in the 17th century, to be shown at this year's Molodist film festival in Kyiv to complement Ihor Sovchenko's 1941 Soviet film on the same subject.

In addition to finding a director for a production of Taras Bulba, his main ambition is to shoot a great film about World War II from the Ukrainian point of view, to counter the endless productions about the struggle from the Soviet angle.

"Ukraine lost more than any others in the war, and no film has yet been made about its war," pointed out Mr. Mashenko. "After all, what is a country without its history? It's nothing!"

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