A little known and very important feature documentary by the Ukrainian classic Oleksander Dovzhenko “Battle for Our Soviet Ukraine” (1943) was featured in the program of the conference “Films from the Darkest Hour, Europe, 1942-1943” organized by the Yale University Film Studies Center.

Yuri Shevchuk was invited to take part in the three-day event and discuss the film on a panel with Katerina Clark (Yale) and Mikhail Iampolski (New York University). This film, noted Yuri Shevchuk, is one of the last Soviet films where Ukrainians are presented as subjects, and not mere objects, of history, as the people who made a decisive contribution into the victory over Nazi Germany, the fact that is now all but forgotten outside Ukraine. He also discussed in his remarks two parallel often clashing narratives on the liberation of Ukraine from Nazi occupation created by Dovzhenko – one in the film and another in his diaries.