Kyiv hosts preview of Hollywood director’s documentary about Holodomor
The Holodomor was a crime perpetrated on a scope never previously known in human history. Any sober-minded ethnic communal member would be shocked to consider a government, allegedly established by the working masses, being able to cold-bloodedly plan and then systematically destroy up to 10 million citizens simply because of their Ukrainian parentage, members of the ruling Communist Party or not, peasants and intellectuals alike.
Stalin’s regime committed a crime against humanity, the 1932–33 Holodomor in Ukraine, on a scope that rules out any statutes of limitation, something we will never forget or forgive. The main thing is to know the truth. It is the horrible truth, but it would be even more horrifying to look the other way. It is a duty of every dedicated Ukrainian to convey the truth of the Holodomor of 1932–33 to every continent, just as it is a duty of every nation on this planet to pay homage to the victims of man-made famines.
The preview of Hollywood director Bobby Leigh’s documentary Holodomor: Ukraine’s Genocide gathered an eager audience at the Culture and Art Center of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, including surviving eyewitnesses, members of civic, student, and scholarly associations, and of course media people. They were unanimous in appreciating Leigh’s production, its skillfully edited documentary footage along with expert commentaries by Stanislav Kulchytsky, Ihor Yukhnovsky, Vasyl Marochko, Taras Hunczak, and the impact it made on the audience with the blood-curdling eyewitness accounts of that dark evil Stalinist period.
Serhii Kvit, president of Kyiv Mohyla Academy, stressed that his institution has always regarded the Holodomor topic as an essential, top-priority part of its research and public information policy. After the Orange Revolution this issue had become part of Ukraine’s official policy — and this was “the right and important decision,” declared Kvit, adding that the preview of Leigh’s documentary was a very important cultural event held in conjunction with the Holodomor Remembrance Week.
This full-length documentary with the running time of over one hour is a joint Moksha Films and Tomkiw Entertainment project involving experts from Ukraine, Canada, and the United States. Most of the footage was done in Ukraine’s regions that suffered most during the Holodomor, specifically in Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv, Mykolaiv, Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Cherkasy oblasts. While focusing on the Great Famine of 1932–33, this documentary traces the roots of this tragedy all the way back to 1917, when the Bolsheviks came to power. The film crew’s undeniable accomplishment is putting across to the audience the simple horrible truth: Ukrainians would have never suffered such a tragedy if they had formed a nation state, whose government would have been capable of warding off any Kremlin attempts aimed at bringing Ukraine to its knees.
This documentary repeatedly reminds the viewer of the tremendous achievements made by James Mace, a Ukrainian-American researcher, lecturer at Kyiv Mohyl Academy, and Den’s leading journalist, as well as by Gareth Jones, a British journalist, one of few among his colleagues to tell Europe the truth about what was happening in Ukraine in 1933.
COMMENTARY
Natalia DZIUBENKO-MACE:
“This is a very good documentary. Too bad there is no footage of our politicians — we all know them for we can see them on our television screens almost every night — who voted at the Verkhovna Rada against the bill recognizing the Holodomor as an act of genocide against the Ukrainian nation. We might find ourselves faced with another guarantor of the constitution [i.e., President of Ukraine — Ed.] for whom Holodomor would be another myth being proliferated by the nationalists. God forbid!
“It hurts when the West sometimes doesn’t understand us when we talk about this tragedy of the Ukrainian people — probably because they can’t believe something like that to have actually occurred in the history of humankind. A number of Ukrainian priests who were persecuted and prosecuted back in 1933 must have asked themselves this painful question: ‘Will there be anyone left to offer up prayers for the souls of all those who died as innocent victims?’ I feel sure that this question is for us to answer.”
Vasyl MAROCHKO, Holodomor researcher:
“People keep asking me, ‘How long will we be speaking about the Holodomor?’ People have daily problems to cope with, and this seems far more important. Also, so much has been written about this apocalyptic tragedy that you find yourself thinking about when public conscience will finally awaken to the fact.
“Regarding our strategy in dealing with Russians, particularly Russian colleagues, I don’t think that we should even try to convince anyone that what we’re saying is true. All we have to do is carry out our mission. We must say the truth about the Holodomor, so long as we have eyewitnesses, all those people who tell us their stories with tears in their eyes, and so long as there are all those indifferent characters who keep telling us it’s not worth reopening old sores. We have no right to make [another] mistake.”
The documentary Holodomor: Ukraine’s Genocide (to be further edited) has starred in a number of international film festivals, in particular in France and the United States. The film ends with a harsh question for the audience, ‘How many senseless and ruthless deaths can you personally endure?’
