Thursday, September 15, 2011

Celebrating the 20th anniversary of independent Ukraine

Cinema Orion, Helsinki, 15 September, 2011.

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of independent Ukraine the Ambassador himself, Mr. Andri Deshtshitsja, opened our jubileum retrospective, planned by the young Finnish-Ukrainian conductor, Ms. Dalia Stasevska. The opening film was Oleksandr Dovzhenko's wild and poetic saga, Zvenigora, perhaps a strange choice for the diplomatic corps, but at least a unique and unforgettable work from the land of poetry. There is a clear continuum of Ukrainian film poetry, and we are celebrating it with films by Dovzhenko, Paradzhanov, Ilyenko, Osyka, and Muratova. Not forgetting one of the most terrible events of the 20th century: the 1933 holodomor, when millions perished in a man-made famine during Stalin's reign of terror.

Zvenigora (1928)
Tini zabutuh predkiv / Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors (1965)
Rodnik dlya zhazhdushchikh / A Spring for the Thirsty (1965)
Kaminnyi hrest / A Stone Cross (1968)
Bilyy ptakh z chornoyu vidznakoyu / The White Bird Marked with Black (1971)
Astenicheskiy sindrom / The Asthenic Syndrome (1990)
Holod 33 / Famine 33 (1991)

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