Fear and tenderness in Mykolaivka

The Berlinale is considered to be the most globalized A-class film festival. Its organizers emphasize the participation of filmmakers from Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa. But even given such a favorable policy, our cinema wins awards there by far not as often as we would like it to.

This year the only Ukrainian film in the festival’s contest was documentary drama School No. 3 (a Ukrainian-German coproduction) which took part, together with 15 films from various countries, in the Generation 14plus youth cinema program and won the Grand Prix.

The Jury said in its decision: “We give the Grand Prix to a film that unpacked itself slowly involving the audience through details and personal account from the perspective of its protagonists, delivering with a range of tenderness, trauma, and even banality and humor. It has a sensitive approach and is direct in form without discourse or presumption. We admire the collaboration between director, cinematographer, and protagonists and how they built a space of trust. This film doesn’t let the narrative of war take over the emotional world of its young characters, who allowed us to connect with the most precious and intimate details of their lives.”

The film is based on the documentary theater production My Mykolayivka. In July 2014 the Ukrainian army and “DNR” militants fought for the town of Mykolaivka (population: 16,000), Sloviansk raion, Donetsk oblast. Residents were hiding in basements, and shells also hit school No. 3. Volunteers and local civilians rebuilt the school but did not confine themselves to this – they launched several cultural and social projects. In the production staged jointly by the German director Georg Genoux and the Kyiv-based playwright Natalia Vorozhbyt and shown in Berlin and Ukraine by the Theater of the Migrant, senior pupils speak about the impact of the 2014 events on them, their first loves, and plans for the future. The film is in its turn a joint project of Genoux and the Ukrainian film directress Yelizaveta Smith who has filmed several video fragments for My Mykolayivka before.

By genre, School No. 3 can be called a private chronicle without a protagonist. The point of departure for all the monologues, usually shot as a most intimate frontal close-up, is an object associated with personal recollections. A crash helmet, a pendant, a tennis ball, an Eiffel Tower-shaped souvenir – each of these things calls up the picture of a life, the faces of relatives and dear ones, and reveals landscapes of experience. Somebody lost the beloved one. Somebody narrowly escaped a motorcycle crash. Somebody lost and then found their dog. Somebody fatally latched onto a person with strong pro-Russian views. Somebody, to distract themselves from a difficult personal situation, show a miniature in the theater of shadows, and somebody cheerfully sings a simple song to the cell-phone soundtrack. The war is a secondary motif here and gives way to intimate, albeit no less dramatic, situations. Teenagers speak awkwardly and falteringly, but the level of sincerity is so high that any eloquence loses value (although there also are born actors among them). These confessions – either Homerically funny, when, for example, a guy regularly goes on a binge over a broken heart, or strikingly adult-like, when a boy ponders whether he could kill a human being if he cannot even kill a beetle – are interrupted by rhythmically precise and colorful interludes, where young people just play the fool or settle scores with a funnily exaggerated emotions.

Paraphrasing the well-known American-Israeli video artist Omer Fast, whose exhibit was held concurrently with the Berlinale on the festival’s territory, one can say that the School No. 3 directors take interest in the way experience turns into memory and memory in turn becomes a set of stories. So it would be a glaring mistake to call Mykolaivka schoolchildren actors. On the contrary, through the dissonance of their confessions, they position themselves as mediators of the narrative – they create the latter before our eyes, often on the basis of their far from childish experience, and, in this sense, they are as much coauthors of the film as Yelizaveta, Georg, and Natalia. The result of this close co-authorship is a portrait, equally passionate and touching, of a generation.

School No. 3 is a message to everybody, no matter what country they live in – to anybody who fought for their truth, suffered a major loss, or was on the verge of death, to anybody who once was in love.

BLITZ-INTERVIEW

Yelizaveta SMITH: “There was a space on the screen, where children allowed us to be”

How did your film come up?

“To begin with, New Donbas project volunteers and we went to rebuild school No. 3 in Mykolaivka. Some were doing it physically, while I worked with children – we were putting on a show to mark St. Nicholas Day. Georg Genoux played St. Nicholas. We also met Natalia Vorozhbyt there. About a month later we were invited to stage the show. We thought we would be filming preparatory work. As a result, the videos we made when strolling with children were used as fragments in the show. Then Georg and I decided it was time to get down to the film. So we filmed the monologues of all the 13 teenagers and went on filming their everyday life. We worked for 18 months. Not all the monologues from My Mykolayivka were included into School No. 3. On the other hand, we added some scenes that did not fit in with the stage production’s concept.”

What goal did you set to yourselves as directors?

“We set a goal as humans rather than as directors, for mingling with these teenagers resulted in a therapy that helped both them and us. We also understood that if we jumped together from a bridge or roamed on the hills, the screen was leaving a space, where the children allowed us to be – and this is something very personal and special. So, again, I can’t say what the director’s goal was, but still I learned and understood a lot.”

Were they willing to come into contact?

“Yes, very much. This is what in fact made the film. We established close links during the first journey: we shared our favorite books and Zhadan’s poems, downloaded films and songs. They would tell their stories very willingly and let us into their world. It was a pleasure to both sides.”

What makes ATO children different from those residing on peaceful territories?

“They are much more mature, for they live in a situation in which many of us have never been, and this prompts them to ponder over the questions we don’t usually think over – for example: could I kill a human being? They take a very humane attitude to their relatives and to one another. Many of these children are very profound, but they don’t have much choice. In big cities, teenagers can go to the movies or a club, while in the ATO zone – only to a pizzeria before 9 p.m. and then get sloshed in the park. But our children immediately grabbed the instrument of self-expression. It all began with the theater of shadows. They set it up at school by themselves, and it still exists. The same applies to the newspaper Golosa goroda which volunteers helped to establish. So the basic difference is that they want to be active.”

Are you in touch with them now?

“We always phone to each other, they visit me both in summer and in winter, it’s a never-ending story. We are friends.”

To what extent has working on the stage production and the film changed them and you?

“Their life has changed very much, and, undoubtedly, their horizons have broadened. As for me, I am saying again that this experience taught me, both as an individual and as a director, very much. Above all, it is tolerance. It is very often difficult to hear the facts that you think are false and treat a certain person seriously, but if you want a dialog, if you want to hear an individual, you must know what he or she thinks. Besides, as a film director, I know what I am in search of. I am in search of a process – not the result, not the footage, but a process together with heroes. It is very interesting. It seems to me that even if I take up fictional cinema, I will know what I’ll be doing there now that I’ve made School No. 3.”

What are your plans?

“I am finishing the Petro Tsymbalist, the film about a person we met on the Maidan, who goes to Sloviansk at the end of the story. There are also many similar motifs there, but the form is different than that of School No. 3. I am not seeking the ATO theme on purpose. I am also working on social projects – for example, Natalia Vorozhbyt and I have carried out the project ‘Class Act: East-West’ aimed at establishing links among teenagers in various parts of Ukraine.”

To conclude with, as the film is being shown here in Germany to the people who are usually unaware of our realities, what reaction do you expect from the audience?

“I would like moviegoers to hear the children who have gone through a war but still remain as lively, cool, and cheerful as their peers in Berlin, New York, and Kyiv – it doesn’t matter where. It is a very profound process which is clear not only to Ukrainians but also to all the other people.”