Film on Dzhemilev to be shown in spring

The making of the film began in February 2015 and lasted for 18 months. The project was carried out with support from the National Fund in Support of Democracy, the NGO “Garage Gang,” partners “Crimea. Realities,” ATR, and QHA, as well as 252 philanthropists who believed in the project and funded it on Spilnokosht, i-pro-.kiev.ua reports. During the filmmaking period, the creative team in charge of the project visited Kyiv, Lviv, Crimea, New York, Warsaw, Gdansk, Ankara, and recorded 26 interviews. Unfortunately, a great deal of material remained outside the film owing to a clear-cut time limit. But what has changed is not only the size of the material, but also the format – the project team at first planned to make a full-length documentary film, but, in the course of work, they switched to the genre of a docudrama so that audiences could better perceive the picture. In the historical reenactments, the role of the protagonist was played by Maksym Pasichnyk.

The film Mustafa focuses on the life story of the Crimean Tatar people’s leader who is revealed to the spectator through the narrations of Mustafa Dzhemilev, his family, and comrades in the struggle for returning Crimea (in the Soviet era and now).

Filmgoers will share with Mustafa-aga some of the key reminiscences of his life: forced deportation in 1944, the first imprisonment, the world’s longest hunger strike that lasted for 303 days, etc.

Friedrich Nietzsche’s quotation “That which does not kill us makes us stronger,” written on the prison cell wall, fully corresponds to the film’s meaning and the protagonist’s character.

“The memory about Mustafa Dzhemilev is only preserved in texts, and there was nothing visual that could convey the content of events in the screen language. We decided to use all the available means (photos, newsreels, visual arts, and publications) to tell the story by way of cinema,” film director Ahmed SARIKHALIL said.

The picture uses documentary photographs as well as the unique video footage of the Crimean Tatars’ return to Crimea during the perestroika. The film crew managed to show even the moments that have no visual confirmation by means of illustrations made by the artist Milochi Zaltain.

“Ukrainians will see the film in movie theaters from May 18, the anniversary of the Crimean Tatars’ deportation, onwards. It is also planned to show it at the Sundance Film Festival, the largest independent film festival in the United States, at the Berlin Film Festival, and at a number of other festivals of documentary films,” the picture’s producer Tamila Tasheva said.

It will be recalled that the documentary film about Mustafa Dzhemilev premiered at the 46th Kyiv International Film Festival Molodist as part of the “Ukrainian Premieres” program.