The unity of pain and beauty

Juri Rechinsky was born in 1986. He studied at the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, then he entered the Karpenko-Kary University, but dropped his studied six months later. His first film Sick Fuck People, a documentary about homeless drug addicts, won awards at the festivals in Canada, France, England, Poland, and Austria.

The world premiere of Rechinsky feature debut Between January and March (The international title is Ugly, it’s a joint production of Ukraine and Austria) will take place in the end of January at Rotterdam Festival, which is known for its attention to the innovation and experimental cinema. The film was selected for the competition of feature debuts “Bright Future,” which presents 16 films.

Between January and March was shot in 2014 through 2015 in Kryvyi Rih and Vienna. The Ukrainian director was greatly assisted by his famous colleague, Austrian Ulrich Seidl, who is known due to his drama films Dog Days and Import/Export, trilogy Paradise, and a number of perfect documentary works. His company Ulrich Seidl Filmproduktion is a co-producer of Ugly. The cameramen who worked on Between January and March are last year’s winners of the Academy Awards, Wolfgang Thaler (he shot Paradise, Import/Export) and his son Sebastian Thaler, and one of the main female roles in Between January and March was performed by the star of Seidl’s films Faith and Dog Days, an outstanding European actress Maria Hofstaetter.

Other roles were performed by Angela Gregovic (Serbia), Dmitry Bogdan (Russia), Larysa Rusnak, Vlad Troitsky, Valerii Bassel (Ukraine), and Raimund Wallisch (Austria). The original soundtrack was created by composer Anton Baibakov (Ukrainian Sheriffs, Euromaidan. Draft Cutting, A Shop of Singing Birds, Sick Fuck People).

Between January and March consists of two parallel plots. A young married couple gets in a car accident in Ukraine. The husband named Yurii (Dmitry Bogdan) has to stay near his wife in a Kryvyi Rih hospital. His wife, Austrian Hanna (Angela Gregovic) is recovering very slowly. At the same time in Vienna Hanna’s mother Marta (Maria Hofstaetter) gradually plunges into the dissociative identity disorder caused by Alzheimer’s disease.

The flaws of the film are typical for any debut – these are the mistakes in dramaturgy. The Ukrainian party is too fragmentized, sometimes the actors lack motivation and seamlessness. But both Kryvyi Rih and Vienna scenes were shot in a simply enchanting manner, and now it can be predicted that both Thalers will win awards for Between January and March.

The Austrian plot was created later. There one can feel the experienced and more confident work of the director: everything is fine with the dialogs and the development of the characters. Of course the brightest impression is the work of Maria Hofstaetter. She is painfully convincing in the role of a confused person who is facing self-oblivion (actually, one of the first symptoms is that she cannot recall the word of the month February, hence the title of the film).

The title Ugly is the sign of the unity of ill-being. Yurii who says that he doesn’t know how to feel anymore feels like a cripple. The ugliness of the disease exhausts Hanna, Marta, and their husbands. But there is hope in this story. Love and compassion break through the pain and merciless wind, which blows above the field of dry reed (it’s a piercing image in the film).

So, in spite of all the contradictions, the release of Between January and March is clearly the most important event in Ukrainian cinema this year.

The Day was the first newspaper to take an interview from Juri Rechinsky before the screening of the film in Rotterdam.

“THESE ARE TWO VERY DIFFERENT SPACES, BUT SAME TROUBLES ARE PRESENT THERE”

How did this story begin?

“I had a situation in a hospital, somewhat similar to the situation the characters in the Ukrainian plot line find themselves with. I overcame this experience with the help of the project Sick Fuck People, but I started to see separate scenes from the hospital in my dreams. At a certain moment I started to record them. It took me three weeks to do this. Then I came to Austria to finish Sick Fuck People, and the producer asked me what I was going to do next, and I described this story to him. We wrote and improved everything for a long time, but when the shooting started I understood that I didn’t believe what I saw on the screen. For the first 10 days I was trying to find different approaches to the work with the actors, and then I felt that what we were making conveyed a necessary mood.”

When did Seidl appear in the project?

“Our executive producer and partially my coauthor Klaus Pridnig who for a long time has resided in Kyiv watched the short version of Sick Fuck People and six months later he said that there was a company in Austria which took interest in making a feature film based on it and buying it. And the first viewer of the final montage of the feature film Sick Fuck People Michael Glawogger (a well-known Austrian documentary film director) with whom Klaus had worked as an assistant director. Glawogger praised us and helped to show the film to Seidl, and then Seidl came to Kyiv and I helped him with the locations. It was interesting for him to produce my works. When we had problems with funding, and Ugly could be halted, Klaus and I told Seidl about that, and he asked us to show what we had. After the screening of the Ukrainian material he confirmed that he would coproduce us. And a week later we closed the budget.”

Was it easy to switch to live-action cinema from documentary films?

“It was extremely painful, because I had no idea how to work with the actors. The only reason I dared do this was because I trusted my feeling of authenticity of what we were shooting. Between January and March was shot as a half-documentary anyway. Those were long many-hour scenes in which the actors were never told to stop. They got a description of the situation, often they were given mutually opposite tasks, they were prepared in terms of development of the characters, and then the action started, and we tried to catch it. In documentary films you need to convince the character to open himself, and in live-action film you have a very subtle instrument – an actor who wants to be opened. And this is greatly pulling you in the process. There are many scenes in Ugly I am proud of including the ones we did together with the actors.”

What was the work with Hofstaetter like?

“She prepares very seriously and very long for the creation of the character. From the script she knew only that her heroine had Alzheimer. So, for a year she visited a clinic where the patients with Alzheimer were treated. She worked with them, she found characters, their relatives, she did interviews with them, she visited their homes. She’s a real maniac in a good sense. At the shooting ground she gets very excited before every scene, but she is one of the most easy-going and easy to work with people I know. It is easier only with Wolfgang Thaler.”

The quality of his work is outstanding.

“What episodes do you mean?”

For example, the scene of the family row in Kryvyi Rih with candles lit is pure Rembrandt.

“It was a happy coincidence. We came to this flat, started to shoot, and five minutes later the lights disappears in the entire neighborhood. And we found candles, lit them and understood that it was just what we needed. Don’t switch the light back! Many scenes appeared or underwent considerable changes depending on the conditions on spot.

“Wolfgang, like me, doesn’t like cinematographic lightning. If in the space there are the sources of light, he spends some time to switch some lights and changes some bulbs. His great human achievement is that he is not trying to be a teacher or a boss. He helped me in every way to understand what I wanted. We spent some time, looking for the way how the camera works and when we found it, we continued to work easily and with pleasure.”

If the audience is outraged by your film, will you consider this a success?

“I don’t know what success in the context of this format is when you live for several years with one film without any days off, and then show it at a festival to people who watch seven films a day. What is the end goal, except for the possibility to live with this work for a long time? Maybe the success in this sense is definitely not a concrete reaction of a concrete group of people. From the pragmatic point of view, it will be a success if I continue to shoot and will have a needed level of freedom in what I do. Also it will be a success to watch how this film works with a great number of people in the audience. I cannot say that the work on Between January and March is over, because it hasn’t had a big screening, because I haven’t sat yet in a cinema next to unknown people and haven’t seen their faces after the screening. The feeling of completion with Sick Fuck People I had after six months of screenings.”

Why is the screening in Rotterdam so important?

“The further destiny of the film depends on this premiere. This is the first big festival of the year in Europe, there will be a lot of festival distributors, in a word, everything will be decided after the premiere.”

What are the screening prospects at the moment?

“The screening has been confirmed in Austria, because the film was funded by the local television. They have seen it and they were hugely impressed. As for Ukraine, I don’t know. Probably, the premiere will take place at the Odesa festival. We are preparing a version for the movie theaters as well.”

What are you planning to do next?

“There are two ideas, the documentary and live action ones. The first one is a mosaic structure, the shooting will take place in different parts of the world, with a great number of situations and characters. There will be three parts about sex, pregnancy, and death, and how people experience them. Seidl’s company and Final Cut For Real, Joshua Oppenheimer’s company, took interest in producing it a year ago. But we couldn’t get the funding in Austria, because Between January and March project was still underway. Hopefully, we will renew this work now. The second project is a purely actor’s story about a person who wakes up, unsure whether it was in the right place. The place resembles Vienna, but it’s Kafka’s Vienna.”

It is only left to wish you success in Rotterdam. We will keep our fingers crossed.

“Thank you.”