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Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty
Henry M. Robert

IN MOSCOW FILMS ON UKRAINIAN CHILDREN EARN MONEY While here children are fed Hollywood slashers

13 November, 2012 - 00:00

Mykola Sedniv found himself lost in the bureaucratic labyrinth after making To Wake Up in Shanghai six years ago in the Odesa Studios, now struggling to push the movie through to national television or at least movie theaters, anywhere in Ukraine.

This extremely cheerful, kind-hearted, enlightening production won its author the Grand Prix at the 1992 International Children and Youth Film Festival (Kharkiv) and the highest ratings at Moscow's 1992 Interfest. The film made headlines in Russia, Germany, Israel, and the United States –wherever the film rental firms brought it. But not in Ukraine. Never!

"Not so long ago I suggested the government suspend financing children's movies and straighten things out there first," says Mykola Sedniv. "You think it a paradox, don't you? A proposal like this coming from a children's film director who has been jobless for several years on end? I agree, it is very out of the ordinary. But I thought this the only way to draw the authorities' attention to all the pressing problems of children's cinematography..."

The following is from Mr. Sedniv's open letter to President Leonid Kuchma: "Why is my film, made as it was with basically state budget funds and at government-run studios, not shown at movie theaters or on television? Why are the negatives of children's films made in Ukraine and rights to show them transferred to foreign firms? With children movie dealers proposing that we jobless filmmakers take up child porno films in the meantime?"

Sadly, the film director's appeal was but a voice in the wilderness to which the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture and the National Television Company of Ukraine responded with coldly formal letters suggesting that he use his own resources to locate the current owners of his motion picture To Wake Up in Shanghai, and if and when he does locate them, that he proceed to finance its duplication at his own cost and eventually exercise his theater-television rights. Both the ministry and the television company are all set to convince the director that his production is no longer topical, and that the younger audiences will not suffer if they do not see it, period. In fact, Mykola Maziar, head of the Culture Ministry's Cinematography Department, tried to make this message clear to The Day's reporter who had asked for an explanation.

Ihor Zhukov, First Vice President of the National Television Company, told The Day that the company is selecting for public showing films winning the Golden Chicken Festival founded by the Ministry of Culture and Ukrainian Cinematographers' Union. As for Mykola Sedniv's To Wake Up in Shanghai, Mr. Zhukov said that the Company could not afford to buy this picture, not at the moment, adding that the film could be shown provided a Ukrainian businessman bought the rights.

The fact remains that the Ministry of Culture allocated 150,000 rubles in this production back in 1991, yet the picture is owned by Moscow's CENDISI Co. which signed a contract with the Odesa Studios to finance the final production stage. In one of the letters Minister of Culture Dmytro Ostapenko tries to mollify Director Sedniv, assuring him that his "film has been duplicated by the firm responsible for its public demonstration, after receiving it from the authorized film demonstration association..." It does not take a Sherlock Holmes to understand why Moscow hired video club owners uncork champagne bottles and toast Ukrainian filmmakers every time a children's movie is released. Every such picture is duplicated in Moscow and the proceeds are not likely to be shared with the authors in Kyiv, let alone transferred as their rightful due.

 

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