Still from Decay/Rozpad In this interview with Peter Almond, the co-producer of the Ukrainian classic Decay/Rozpad, guest writer Stanislav Menzelevskyi learns what the political landscape was like during the film’s production, how Almond came to the project, and more. In 1989, Peter Almond, an American scriptwriter and producer, was visiting his parents in Kyiv. His… Read more »
In Jonathan Rosenbaum’s definitive 2002 text on the Ukrainian filmmaker Alexander Dovzhenko, he persuasively argues that Dovzhenko’s cinema represents a form of “heroic portraiture” more than it does a vehicle for storytelling or narrative expression. Comparing Dovzhenko’s work with a more contemporary film by Jean-Marie Straub, Rosenbaum writes that “[Straub’s film] qualifies as heroic portraiture… Read more »
Guest post by Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed. This year the Ukrainian Homelands Series screens three films that explore memory from various perspectives. Akhtem Seitablayev’s Cyborgs: Heroes Never Die (2017) is one of the films that touches upon the current tragic and traumatic stage of contemporary Ukrainian history: a military conflict in the Donbass involving Ukraine and Russia…. Read more »
Guest post by Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed. This semester the Ukrainian Homelands series includes Everything is Illuminated (2005), based on the novel of the same name written by the American writer Jonathan Safran Foer. Directed by Liev Schreiber, this film—which bridges at least five cultural dimensions (American, Jewish, Ukrainian, Russian, and German)—narrates the story of the Jewish… Read more »
Guest post by Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed. This year the Ukrainian Homelands Series explores memory as one of the central elements for facilitating transcultural and transnational conversation regarding what we know about our own selves and others, what we remember, and what we forget. Sergei Loznitsa’s Donbass (2018) opens this year’s series: this film emphasizes the topic… Read more »
Guest post by Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed and Svitlana Melnyk. In 2018 the Dovzhenko Film Studios (Kyiv, Ukraine) celebrates its 90th anniversary. Organized during the Soviet period and named after the Ukrainian film producer Oleksandr Dovzhenko in 1957, it contributed to the versatile development of Soviet cinematography. A production place for such masterpieces as Earth (1930) and White… Read more »