The obligatory picture at Columbia University's Alma Mater.

True to its mission of giving international exposure to young Ukrainian filmmaking talent, the Ukrainian Film Club held a special screening of "The Ukrainian Sheriffs". The feature documentary was directed by Roman Bondarchuk and produced by Dar'ya Averchenko. For both the film is their debut in the genre of the feature length documentary. The very well attended Columbia screening was immediately followed by another such event at the Ukrainian Institute of America in New York, N.Y. on December 7. Both were attended by Mr. Bondarchuk and Mrs. Averchenko who were in the United States promoting their film, which is Ukraine's official entry for the Oscar consideration in the best foreign language film category.

Oscars or not, "The Ukrainian Sheriffs" should be seen by everybody who would like to understand the present-day Ukraine in its complexity and outside the easy, simplistic, and inevitably misleading dichotomies so dear to a great majority of foreign observers writing about that country: nationalist east vs pro-Russian west, Ukrainian-speakers vs. Russian-speakers, Orthodox Christians vs Greek Catholics, etc.). At first glance, the film is about an ordinary village community in the south of Ukraine (Kherson Province), that the Russian imperial propaganda calls Novorosiya or New Russia, implying that these areas are in spirit Russian and should be "returned" to the imperial fold. But in a deeper sense, this is a story of why the so called "Russian Spring", a military operation designed in the Kremlin and aiming at annexing, alongside Crimea, four other southern provinces of Ukraine (Odesa, Mykolayiv, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia) suffered a humiliating defeat as a consequence of a mass grassroots mobilization of the local population, willing to defend the independence Ukraine. The film gives voice to the historical actors, local Ukrainian citizens, who have been all do often ignored, and who at the critical moment in their country's history, regained their political agency and became a force to be counted with. (Yuri Shevchuk)

Below are three reviews of "The Ukrainian Sheriffs" by students of Ukraine from Ukraine, USA, and Canada.
 

An Unsolved Narrative. A Hopeful Future

On Monday, December 5, an audience gathered for another film screening at Columbia University's Ukrainian Film Club. Director Roman Bondarchuk and producer Dar'ya Averchenko delighted the crowd with a screening of their documentary film "The Ukrainian Sheriffs," which was also recently revealed to be Ukraine's 2017 Oscar entry into the Best Foreign Language Film category.
"Ukrainian Sheriffs" made its world premier in 2015 at the Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival, where it was critically acclaimed and gained a substantial following.

The documentary, labeled by director Roman Bondarchuk as "tragicomic", itself was filmed over the course of four years, allowing it to capture, uniquely, not a storyline but a reality. The film follows two sheriffs Viktor and Volodia, a classic duo, in the Southern Ukrainian village of Stara Zburyivka, population 2,500 people, located 20 kilometers from the nearest police station and anxiously close to the Crimean border. The sheriffs were appointed by the village's beloved mayor, Viktor Maruniak, to maintain peace and order amongst the village's many zany characters.

The film follows Viktor and Volodia as they respond to calls about (mostly) domestic disturbances and petty theft and referee with good intentions but limited resources. The action is slightly reminiscent of a Ukrainian version of the American TV show Cops, but with more handshakes and "man-to-man" negotiations, sometimes ending with a celebratory drink at the table.

Viktor and  Volodia maintain their no-nonsense approach to duties as sheriffs, even as they chase around a clever bum with a penchant for avoiding work and simultaneously antagonizing and confessing his love for his wife, Tania. The sheriffs do their best to help a woman with an anaconda in her shed, to find an axe-slinging alcoholic on the loose, and oversee the funerals of village people. Viewers cannot help but feel compassion for both the sheriffs and the villagers, who are forgotten by the outside world but are intent on living out the best versions of their lives.

The film is dotted by scenes inside a tower high above a forest in the village. A man climbs up and down the tower every day, on the look out for forest fires. He looks out from his tower with eagle eyes as he listens to a noisy radio. It is from this radio atop the tower that viewers find out about the annexation of Crimea by Russia, and suddenly the village of Stara Zburyivka is covered by a cloud of uncertainty.

The Ukrainian army begins sending out draft notices in anticipation of the war with Russia, and the sheriffs of Stara Zburyivka are tasked with delivering draft notices to the villagers. The political challenges in the nation are felt in the small village, and viewers realize that some crimes are not in the sheriffs' jurisdiction, no matter their limitless attitude or burgeoning hope.

The village scrambles to adjust itself to the outbreak of war and becomes a looking glass through which the changing tides in Ukraine can be observed. At a village meeting, one particularly pro-Russian villager schemes to establish a new branch of power in the village positioned against the mayor, to which he was met with resounding cries of treason. At the village's annual commemoration of the end of World War II (the symbolic 70th anniversary in the year 2014, at the time of filming), the sheriffs help get the village ready for the commemorative events, but not without expressing their uneasy feelings about celebrating a Soviet-era holiday, in light of recent Russian aggression in Ukraine both in Crimea and Donbas. Indeed, the sheriffs and the villagers assemble themselves into patriotic squads to guard their village, their region, their country. These small yet significant acts of unity were happening all over Ukraine.

The end of the documentary leaves the viewer feeling unsettled. The unsolved narrative, however, masterfully allows the viewer to feel hopeful for the future of Stara Zburyivka and Ukraine because people like Viktor and Volodia are ready to defend their people and their inherently democratic values at a moment's notice.

Maryna Prykhodko,
Ph.D. student, New York University

*                   *                   *

Vigilante Justice and Echoes of War in a Ukrainian Village

          Lacking an adequate police force, the residents of the remote village of Stara Zburyivka in southern Ukraine have found their own solution for upholding law and order. Directed by Roman Bondarchuk and produced by Darya Averchenko, Uldis Cekulis, and Tania Georgieva, Ukrainian Sheriffs (2015) is a documentary film that chronicles the daily life of the two village men, Vitya and Volodia, who have been charged with keeping the peace amongst the population of 1800. The result is a moving portrayal—at once both tragic and comic—of a community taking matters into its own hands, with compassion and complexity dictating the seemingly simple affair of daily life in Stara Zburyivka. But this community is not immune to outside forces; news of revolutions in Kyiv and referendums in Crimea begins to permeate the fabric of village life, and the residents of Stara Zburyivka—living less than 400 km away from Sevastopol—are left wondering what is to become of themselves, their families, and their country.
          Outfitted with badges and a small yellow car, the senior, mustached Vitya and his hulking, subdued junior, Volodia go about their business in a tough-but-friendly manner, often with cigarettes in hand. A recurrent issue is Kolia, the village drunk and an occasional thief. At one point the two men visit Kolia, who has not been showing up for work, and instruct him to call in advance if he knows he will be drinking. "Are you still beating your wife?," they ask, following up on a previous charge. "I haven't beaten my wife for a month!," Kolia responds, and the two men move on to their next assignment. While village residents sometimes come off like a cast of characters, other episodes throughout the film round out this portrayal, presenting them as complicated individuals, their hopes and fears made salient through overt statements or lingering stares into the camera. Later in the film Kolia inherits his brother's property, only to be jeered at by his neighbors, who call him a drunk and a thief. "I'll show them who I am," mutters Kolia, tending to his new yard, "I'm no bum."
          The film's portrayal of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine is a refreshing take on the topic, illuminating the ways in which this series of events impacts life far away from the capital or zones of conflict. Rather than tear gas and bullets on the frontline, the war seeps into the lives of Stara Zburyivka residents in subtler ways: a grainy television news broadcast, a static-filled radio report, a truckload of soldiers passing through. Some men worry about conscription and justify their choice to evade the draft. Others leave.
          Ukrainian Sheriffs also provides much-needed nuance in the representation of Ukrainians and their relationship to the state and to Russia. The film explodes any simplified notions that factors like geographical proximity or language usage dictate political or cultural allegiance. Stara Zburyivka, where most people speak Ukrainian-inflected Russian (or surzhyk) and live so close to the annexed land of Crimea, is no hotbed of Russian separatism. Fearing army service, one resident simply states: "No Putin, no problems." Nor do the villagers unquestioningly support the new Ukrainian government, with some residents keen on distancing themselves from corruption and oligarchic power. What emerges is a group of individuals merely trying to live their lives, relying on local community structures and leaders in an under-resourced country mired in war.
          For the uninitiated audience, the film could use more context. Those invested or interested in the region will recognize the film's subtle interventions and humor, while those without a contextual basis for history and contemporary events might miss some of the film's most important work. Nonetheless, Bondarchuk's sympathetic and patient film will make a lasting impression on all those moved by the human condition.

Natalia Oshukana,
Ph.D. student, the Graduate Center, CUNY

*                          *                          *

A Quieter Revolution

What happens when "everyday life" suddenly includes a war? Roman Bondarchuk's documentary film Ukrainian Sheriffs offers one view, focusing on a small town in Southern Ukraine near Crimea. When Bondarchuk began filming in the summer of 2013, he had no idea that the town of Stara Zburyivka would suddenly become a border town neighboring newly  "separatist" republics of East Ukraine and annexed Crimea. Yet, what is most remarkable about the film is how few things change in Stara Zburyivka amidst a war and revolution, one of many aspects of this film that make it such an effective and nuanced portrait of today's Ukraine.
Ukrainian Sheriffs focuses on two men hired to bring law and order to poverty-stricken Stara Zburyivka, a town of 1800 in the Kherson region of Ukraine. While their title "sheriffs," calls to mind American westerns, the two men seem to dole out vigilante social justice more than anything else as they serve as intermediaries for the marginalized townspeople of Stara Zburyivka and a very distant-seeming government authority. Victor Hrygorovych and Volodia were hired by the local village chairman Viktor Maruniak, a man determined to clean up Stara Zburyivka. Maruniak, himself an idealist and passionate reformer, came up with the idea of "village sheriffs" in response to a state apparatus that seemed indifferent or incapable of looking out for villages like Stara Zburyivka. When we meet government authorities from outside the town, from district police to regional governors in the film, their inefficiency and callousness stands in stark contrast to Maruniak and his two sheriffs.
Throughout the film, Victor and Volodia play a variety of roles in their positions as sheriffs. In some scenes they serve as social workers, checking in on the homeless and alcohol addicted, eventually helping a homeless man Kolіa get around bureaucratic red tape to move in to a home. In other scenes they are strongmen, hitting a woman who refuses to admit she stole a television from the village council. In the second act of the film, they serve as representatives of the federal government, a government that had abandoned their village, going door to door delivering draft notices to men eligible to fight in the army. The state that no longer had an interest in Stara Zburyivka and its struggling men suddenly showed up at their door. Victor and Volodia recognize this irony, leading to some of the most powerful conversations in the film.
Bondarchuk, in trying to situate the viewer in the mindset of the local residents of Zburyivka, provides no context or timeframe for any of the scenes. In most cases, this creates a nuanced and realistic portrait of local village life. The audience finds out about new policies that may take away local land rights alongside villagers when it is announced at a town meeting. Russia's annexation of Crimea is at first something just heard about on the radio. In some cases however, viewers are expected to have a great deal of background knowledge about the region in order to understand the magnitude of the documentary's central stories. For example, scenes of a political activist trying to recruit people to form a separate "community" within Stara Zburyivka in order to avoid paying taxes to a "corrupt government" seems like a strange interlude, unless you are familiar with the language and tactics of the separatist movements inspired by the war between Russia and Ukraine.
Despite the plethora of documentaries on Ukraine's 2013 Maidan revolution, Bondarchuk's Sheriffs tells a story about contemporary Ukraine rarely seen on film. Some Maidan activists refer to the revolution as a revolution of dignity. They try to eschew the "nationalist" vs. "populist" vs. "anti-Russian" labels applied to the protests by a befuddled international community and argue that the revolution was about dignity for a Ukrainian people, broadly imagined, who have been abandoned by their government. In that sense, towns like Stara Zburyivka may fit in better to this optimistic narrative than Kyiv. When we view Maidan and the war between Russia and Ukraine from the vantage point of Stara Zburyivka, we still see Ukrainians truly committed to each other's dignity, despite continued negligence on behalf of the central government. While jokes are made about "Russians" and Putin, the grand narratives of so-called Ukrainian nationalism are mostly absent from this film. Instead, far from Kyiv and far from Maidan we see a quieter revolution that had begun taking root long before Yanukovych was ousted based on more universal terms. Under the reluctant leadership of two sheriffs, Bondarchuk's documentary shows us a revolution that promises dignity for homeless convicts, for impoverished farmers, and for the ordinary people that make up the majority of Ukraine.

Kathryn David,
Ph.D. candidate in history,
New York University