New York—Finally some good piece of news for all those who care
for Ukrainian film. After two filmless years Ukraine will again take
part in the Oscar competition. According to the official
website of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, this
year one of the Oscar contenders for best foreign film is Aurora by
director Oxana Bayrak.
As the director of the Ukrainian Film Club of Columbia University in
New York City I asked Bayrak’s company, Bayrak Studio, to cooperate
with us in organizing a New York screening of her film. When I didn’t
receive a reply, I decided at least to find out as much as possible about
the elusive Aurora. After all, it was not just any film but
an Oscar contender, the best Ukrainian film of the year! First I asked
my contacts in Ukraine to tell me their impressions of Bayrak’s
film. As it turned out, none of them, not even those who work in the
film industry, had seen it. Until recently, the film was not in the movie
theaters, at least not in Kyiv, Lviv, Odesa, or Kharkiv. Meanwhile the
American Academy’s “Special Rules for the Best Foreign Language
Film Award” state that:
“The film must be first released in the country
submitting the film no earlier than October 1, 2005
and no later than September 30, 2006, and be first
publicly exhibited by means of 35 mm or 70 mm film
for a run of at least seven consecutive days in a commercial
motion picture theater for the profit of the producer
and exhibitor, advertised and exploited during the
run in a manner considered normal and customary to
the industry.”
Further on it says: “Every country shall be invited
to submit its best film to the Academy. Selection of
the best picture from each country shall be made by
one organization, jury or committee that should include
artists and/or craftspeople from the field of motion
pictures. A list of the selection committee members
must be submitted to the Academy no later than August
1, 2006, by 5:00 p.m. PDT.”
Was Aurora screened in Ukraine, and, if so, where and when, and
can one consider such runs and the location of the screenings “normal” for
Ukraine? But if this film was never screened, how did it end up on the
official Oscar contender list? Did the Academy make an exception for Oxana
Bayrak? I contacted IntWestDistribution, the company that co-produced the
film with Bayrak Studio. Yulia Malynovskaya, the PR manager for IntWestDistribution,
told me in a telephone conversation that the Ministry of Culture and Tourism
of Ukraine had submitted Aurora as Ukraine’s official contender
for the Oscar. When I asked her to provide me with the list of members
of the selection committee that had recommended Aurora, Malynovskaya
said she would send it. (She never did.) Then she added that the film was
screened in Sevastopol for seven days in September 2006 expressly in order
to meet the eligibility rules of the Oscar competition. During our conversation
she mentioned Sevastopol at least three times as the city where the film
had been screened.
In order to verify this information, I telephoned Borys Savchenko, the
head of the Union of Cinematographers of Ukraine, who by virtue of his
work should have been acquainted with this film and the procedure of its
submission. Mr. Savchenko said that he had not seen the film. Moreover,
professional institutions that are directly involved in Ukrainian filmmaking,
like the Union of Cinematographers, the Oleksander Dovzhenko Foundation,
the Rylsky Institute of Art, Folklore, and Ethnology at the National Academy
of Sciences of Ukraine (which has a film studies section), the O. Dovzhenko
Film Studio did not take part in the process to select Aurora.
Thus it appears that even if the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of Ukraine
had indeed proposed Aurora, it did so without the knowledge and
participation of the above-mentioned professional film institutions.
Savchenko contacted Valentyn Hrebenny, who is in charge of the film distribution
network in Sevastopol. He confirmed that no film called Aurora was
screened in this city in the last two years. According to Savchenko’s
information, there are no private movie theaters in the city. Thinking
that Ms. Malynovskaya had made an error, on 15 November I wrote to tell
her that her information was incorrect and requested a comment. The next
day I received the following answer:
“The filmmakers replied to questions regarding the film Aurora at
an official press conference. The film will be widely released on 30 November.” This
was followed by references to the official Web site of the US Academy of
Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, where the film is listed as one of several
Oscar contenders.
Since I had obtained neither specific details nor corrected information
from the film’s official representative, IntWestDistribution, I was
forced to contact the Academy’s representatives for an explanation.
On 20 November I received this reply from Ms. Torene Svitil, Awards Coordinator
of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences:
“I received your e-mail with some concern.
We ask filmmaking communities in submitting countries
to follow certain rules. We ask for the names of the
members of the selection committee, and we also ask
for copies of ads demonstrating that the film had a
theatrical run in the submitting country. We received
both of these for the Ukrainian submission.
“Obviously, however, there is much about the
internal processes of this selection that we have no
way of knowing. I have contacted both the Ukrainian
selection committee and the filmmakers asking for an
explanation to your allegations.
“When I have a response, I will respond to your
e-mail at greater length, but I wanted you to know
that we are investigating. Best regards, Torene Svitil,
Awards Coordinator, Academy of Motion Picture Arts
and Sciences”. (As of January 5, 2007, Ms. Svitil
did not respond).
On 23 November Oxana Bayrak held a press conference in Kyiv. According
to the Web site of KINOKOLO Bayrak
said that her film had had a limited seven-day screening run during 11-17
November 2006 at the Spartak movie theater in Symferopol. In a telephone
conversation with KINOKOLO, the director of the Spartak cinema, Iryna Vyshnevska,
confirmed Bayrak’s statement about the week-long screening of Aurora in
September.
At the press conference, Bayrak also said that her film was submitted as
a contender for the Oscar by an organization called the Association to
Promote the Development of Cinematography in Ukraine together with the
Ministry of Culture and Tourism of Ukraine. The filmmaker said that the
association sifted through five films and selected Aurora.
So, now it was not Sevastopol but Symferopol, and not the Ministry of Culture
and Tourism of Ukraine but an institution with its mission clearly stated
in the title: Association to Promote the Development of Cinematography
in Ukraine. The irony here is that this Association earned its notoriety
not by making films but by opposing the right of Ukrainian viewers to see
films in their mother tongue. Until June of 2006, all foreign films were
released in Ukraine only in the Russian language dubbing. An attempt to
rectify this anomaly was made last January when Yekhanurov’s government
passed a decision obliging film distribution companies to gradually switch
to Ukrainian film dubbing, not to the exclusion, but alongside the Russian
language one. By July 2007, 70 percent of all foreign-made films would
be dubbed in Ukrainian. The first films dubbed in Ukrainian Cars and Pirates
of the Caribbean. Dead Man’s Chest were a big success with the
viewers around Ukraine even though the Ukrainian version was often shown
either too early or too late in the day, when fewer viewers come to theaters.
Ukrainian language Cars sold at least 15% more tickets than the
Russian version.
Unable to compete the said Association which apparently represents the
interests of Russian film distribution companies in Ukraine lodged a court
complaint and succeeded in nullifying the government’s decision.
The Yanukovych government which under the existing procedure was the only
entity that could appeal the court ruling refused to do so. In his infamous
reaction to the appeals by many prominent intellectuals to defend the cultural
rights of the majority of Ukrainian citizens, the vice premier for humanitarian
issues Dmytro Tabachnyk, in the past one the principal architects of the
Kuchma cleptocratic regime and now the happy comeback kid of the Yanukovych
era said, “We cannot allow a narrow stratum of Ukrainian-speaking
intelligensia who is afraid of an open competition to determine our cultural
policies”. Thus thanks to the initiative of the Association to Promote
the Development of Cinematography in Ukraine and with the support of the
Yanukovych government we are back to square one: millions of Ukrainians
are effectively being deprived of the right to watch films in their own
language. They are being brazenly Russified.
Now the association is allowed to represent Ukraine before the American
Academy. Is this a bad joke? There is more. When I interviewed Borys Savchenko
for this article, he said of the Association, “Those are the same
people who believe that filmmakers are not entitled to receive money for
their films because these films were made in the Soviet period.”
The Bayrak affair is not just about Aurora, it is about
the principles of fair play, about Ukrainian national cinema, about how
and who can legitimately represent it before the world. It is clear
that Bayrak’s film Aurora did not undergo a process of transparent,
honest, and democratic selection that would have given it the right to
represent the country, not just an individual filmmaker, however
ambitious or unscrupulous. Among the participants of such a process must
be cinematographers, members of national filmmaking community, and also
Ukrainian viewers. Every Ukrainian should have the opportunity to watch
a Ukrainian film that is competing for the Oscar without having to travel
to one single city, even if it is sunny Symferopol. National viewers must
be respected, not looked at simply as a source of profit or a springboard
to fame, whose rights can be trampled with impunity.
In what other country but Ukraine can a film first be proposed as a contender
for the Oscar and later, as an afterthought, released widely two months
after the designated deadline? Why is it impossible to get Bayrak’s
representatives to provide answers to these and other entirely justified
questions? Do we, Ukrainian film viewers, not have the right to know who
is representing Ukraine in the world, and how?
The film Aurora was finally released in 150 copies simultaneously
in Ukraine and Russia on November 30, exactly two months after the deadline
set by the American Academy. I have not yet had the privilege of watching
it here in New York. The first reviews to the film which I read in the
Ukrainian press and heard from professional film critics suggest a depressingly
convincing answer to all these questions. The process of “selection” of
this film was orchestrated in this peculiar manner exactly because the
film would otherwise have failed to pass even a very liberal test for Ukrainianness.
It would have failed not because the director is openly opposed to Ukrainian
culture and language. Not because she seems to question the very idea of
Ukrainian independence: Oxana Bayrak is number 4 in the official electoral
list of contenders for Ukrainian Parliament advanced by the political entity
with a bizarre designation - the Party of Putin’s Policies (Partia
polityky Putina). Bayrak’s film would surely have failed primarily
because there is precious little art and even less Ukrainian identity in
her film. That is one thing that the critics who saw it agree on. “I
felt cynically and brazenly cheated for the entire duration of the film” (Oltarzhevska, Ukraina
Moloda), “The genre of Bayrak’s films can be described
as something of a cinema for rhinoceroses. There is nothing Ukrainian in
them: either in their language, or actors, or spirit, or coloring…” (the
director Mykhailo Illienko). The influential film reviewer for “Dzerkalo
Tyzhnia” Oleh Verhelis wrote, “The viewing of this film … reduced
this writer to a state of … moral and intellectual stupor”.
The Bayrak debacle reflects badly not only on Ukraine and its dysfunctional
government with its disastrous record of neglect of Ukrainian film, language,
and culture. It also reflects badly on the American Academy that seems
to allow its name to be associated with a third-rate product and an unscrupulous
film director pretending to represent a culture she despises. The fact
that “Aurora” by Oxana Bayrak remains on the shortlist of 61
contenders for the Oscar in the best foreign language film category is
both a slap in the face of Ukrainian cinema and a mockery of the very purpose
of one of world’s most prestigious competition for excellence in
cinema. Now only the Academy can correct the situation by removing Aurorafrom
the list, and thus sending all present and future impostors around the
world a clear message that it intends to uphold the principles of fair,
open, and honest play.
Translated from the Ukrainian by Marta D. Olynyk.
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