Cinenews

Columbia University Conference to Commemorate the Holodomor-Genocide

October 1, 2008. Yuri Shevchuk.        

On December 2, 2008 the international conference “Visualizing the Holodomor: the Ukrainian Famine-Genocide of 1932-1933 on Film” will be held at Columbia University in New York. This event is organized by the Ukrainian Studies Program of Columbia and co-sponsored by the Harriman Institute and the Department of Slavic Languages. Held in a string of other academic forums around the USA and Canada to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Great Famine in Ukraine, the Columbia conference will offer a novel approach to raising awareness worldwide of this largely unknown human calamity; it will focus on film, and filmmaking as a means to understand the consequences of this tragedy for Ukraine and the world. Meant to appeal to the widest possible audience of scholars, students and the general public, the conference will bring together academics and filmmakers and investigate analytical and theoretic, as well as empirical, perspectives on the Holodomor. This uniquely Columbia format became possible thanks to the fact that over the last four years, with generous community and Ukrainian Studies Fund support, the Ukrainian Studies Program has gained international recognition as the leading center of Ukrainian film studies in North America.

  The conference will consist of three panels. Panel One “What Happened in 1932-1933. Facts of the Tragedy” will feature opening remarks by Dr. Yuri Shevchuk (Department of Slavic Languages, Columbia University), who will speak on the role of Ukrainian film in visualizing the Holodomor within Ukraine, and a presentation by Dr. Roman Serbyn (Professor of History, Emeritus, University of Quebec at Montreal), a leading expert on the Holodomor in North America, who will recreate the historical context and provide facts of the man-made famine. The panel will start at 1:30 PM and will take place in Room 1512, International Affairs Building, 420 W 118th Street, New York, NY.

  Panel Two “Unearthing the Great Famine by Filming It” will feature a short documentary Kolky by Natasha Mikhalchuk, a film student from Parson School of Design of the New School for Social Research. Natasha, who was born and lived till her early teens in Odesa, Ukraine set out on a journey to trace the history of her father’s family. She visited his native village of Kolky in the Podillia region, south-western Ukraine. Meeting and talking on camera with the locals, she unearthed the memories of a continuous chain of disasters visited upon Ukrainian peasants by foreign invaders: the earliest being the Holodomor of 1932-33 and concomitant collectivization, followed by World War Two, Nazi occupation and slave work in the Reich, and another famine after the war. Kolky is a moving story of discovery of the Holodomor as well as other dramatic aspects of recent Ukrainian history that remain largely outside the collective consciousness of Ukrainian society―even though their eye-witnesses are still alive. Ms. Mikhalchuk’s deeply personal experience assumes larger dimensions of a moral imperative―to make the recording and investigation of oral history of the Great Famine and other historic events that took place in Ukraine a first priority for historians and society at large.

  It is the tragic logic of human suffering that one orchestrated mass murder appears in unexpected ways connected with another. In this case the Ukrainian Holodomor which, alongside ethnic Ukrainians, also effected Jews, Germans, Russians, and other ethnicities who inhabited the Ukrainian countryside at the time, became connected with the Jewish Holocaust. This little known fact is witnessed by hundreds of those who survived both tragedies and lived to testify of them on camera. Dr. Crispin Brooks, archivist of the Shoah Foundation Institution, University of South California in San Diego, discovered a considerable corpus of eye-witness accounts of the Holodomor in the massive documentary holdings of Jewish Holocaust survivors at his institution. The video documents of the Visual History Archive were gathered by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, an organization established by film director Steven Spielberg in 1994 to preserve on videotape the accounts of surviving victims and witnesses of the Holocaust. By 2001, the Foundation had recorded close to 52,000 testimonies in 56 countries and 32 languages. In Ukraine alone, the Shoah Foundation conducted around 3,400 interviews over a four year period, 1995–1999, in 273 locations all over the country.  Dr. Brooks will give an overview of the archival holdings with reference to the Holodomor and bring to light new perspectives drawn from the testimonies. His presentation will be accompanied by video footage of these eye-witness testimonies.

The last conference panel will feature a new film, the feature documentary The Living (Zhyvi) by Serhiy Bukovsky from Kyiv.  Mr. Bukovsky is internationally recognized as one of the best documentary filmmakers in Ukraine today. He was awarded the Shevchenko National Prize of Ukraine for his nine-part TV documentary series “War. A Ukrainian Account” (Viina. Ukrainskyi rakhunok), 2002. In it, he makes an earnest attempt to examine what happened in Ukraine during World War II. The film deeply resonated with the Ukrainian public as it discussed, in an impartial manner, the Ukrainian national resistance, and, in particular, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). In 2005, Bukovsky’s name was again in the press as the teacher and mentor of Mr. Ihor Strembytsky, the first Ukrainian filmmaker ever to win the prestigious Palm d’Or du cour métrage for his short documentary Wayfarers (Podorozhni) at the Cannes International Film Festival.

  Over his 25 year film career, Mr. Bukovsky has demonstrated time and again a readiness to take up the most difficult, at times unpopular, subject and treat it in a way that brings a new light to what seemed exhausted and well known. He also has shown civic engagement and a sense of responsibility that often put him on a collision course with the powers-that-be. His documentary Tomorrow Was a Holiday (Zavtra bulo sviato), 1987 , a film openly critical of the Soviet system, is a celebrated classic of the perestroika era.

It was a sign of recognition that Mr. Bukovsky was invited by the Ukrainian oligarch-turned-Carnegie Viktor Pinchuk to direct Spell Your Name, (Nazvy svoie im’ia)a feature documentary about the Holocaust in Ukraine and, in particular, the Babyn Yar tragedy. The film was produced by Steven Spielberg, who traveled to Ukraine to attend its premier in Kyiv in October, 2006. In it, Serhiy Bukovsky tells another largely unknown story―the story of how, during the Nazi occupation, many Ukrainians risked their lives to save their Jewish neighbors, acquaintances, as well as strangers from sure death.

Shortly afterwards, Mr. Bukovsky was approached by the International Charitable Fund Ukraine-3000 run by Kateryna Yushchenko, Ukraine’s first lady, to direct a feature documentary on the Holodomor for its 75th anniversary. Mr. Bukovsky put together a crew of people which include film writer, critic and historian Serhiy Trymbach, cinematographer Volodomyr Kukorenchuk, a slew of history consultants, in particular Yuri Shapoval, Ivan Dziuba, and Myroslav Popovych (Kyiv), Viktor Listov (Moscow), Oksana Pakhliovska (Rome), Andrea Graziosi (Naples) and others to produce The Living.
 This new film will be presented in person by the director, Serhiy Bukovsky, and by Victoria Bondar, his wife producer, and co-author of the script, at the Rosenthal Auditorium, Schemerhorn Hall at 7:30 PM, one of the best film screening auditoriums on Columbia's campus.  The film authors describe their effort:

"It is equally important to stress that our film about the Ukrainian Famine of 1932-33 aims at finding a new approach to some very painful and sensitive historical material. It is about not just remembering the facts but also understanding the causes and effects of the tragedy and evoking an emotional response in the audience. In a broader sense, this film is not about the Holodomor alone. First and foremost, it is about THE PRICE OF LIBERTY. Ukraine is an unloved but obstinate child of History. For centuries, her people fought a desperate struggle for something that other nations obtained in a much easier way: the right to be themselves, speak their own language, and be called Ukrainians. This conception defines our approach to selecting material for the film. Compositionally, the film will have a nonlinear structure. The events of 1932-33 serve as the basis of the plot. They are its hub – the central station where all “trains” of the plot arrive and from which they depart. It is necessary to understand (and show) the train of events that caused the tragedy of the Holodomor and its consequences. Tentatively, we are talking about a period spanning the year 1917 (the February Revolution in Russia, the patriotic awakening of Ukrainian frontline units, and further events in Ukraine till 1921) and the outbreak of World War II in 1939. These events weave into the fabric of the film. The basic intonation of the film will be free of newspaper rhetoric and TV patter. Ours is a story told in a soft, quiet voice."

Conference attendees will have a unique opportunity not only to be the first on this side of the Atlantic to see The Living (its Ukrainian premier in Kyiv is slated for November 22) but also to discuss the film with its makers and with history and film experts participating in the conference. 

A few weeks prior to the international conference, the Ukrainian Studies Program will mount a photo exhibit of works by Volodymyr Kukorenchuk, the cinematographer of The Living. Some forty beautiful photographs taken by him in the course of shooting in the villages where tragedy unfolded 75 years ago will be shown in the Lehman Library of the International Affairs Building at Columbia University. The pictures are a celebration of the beauty, poetry, and vitality of Ukraine, all of which come through with a quiet and captivating force in portraits of farmers who lived to tell about their experience of the Great Famine.

For further information about the International Conference "Visulaizing the Holodomor: the Ukrainian Famine-Genocide of 1932-1933 on Film", call the Ukrainian Studies Program office at 212-854-4697. ADMISSION IS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.