When Will They Get It?
The Ukrainian short film Wayfarers has won the Palme d’Or in Cannes. Of course, everybody knows this, but it feels great to say it again.
The film director Ihor Strembitsky turned out to be a principled individual. When he appeared on stage to receive the award, he refused to speak Russian, despite the interpreter’s request, saying, “I’m Ukrainian and I will speak my language.”
This immediately made headlines in Russia. Some Russian media people had advised Ihor to do some quick studying even before the awards ceremony. After the ceremony all hell broke loose. For some reason, even Moscow film critics whom I know personally, all of them intellectual and stable individuals, are very tense when they talk to me these days. They ask me why the young film maker couldn’t have said a few words in French on stage. So he can’t, so what? I can’t either, nor can many other winners in Cannes and Venice, and nothing ever happens. Besides, you can always take language courses. In contrast, the situation with the Russian channel NTV appears to be irreparable. In conjunction with what happened in Cannes, this television company, after reporting the Wayfarers’ victory, offered what it believed was a sarcastic commentary, saying that Ihor left the podium with his award but without being understood. How about all those Russian film directors who are well understood, year in and year out, but somehow never appear on stage to receive any awards? And do we really need understanding from NTV, this “world’s most truthful” channel, which last winter, at the peak of the Orange Revolution, thought nothing of playing archival footage showing an empty Maidan in Kyiv, and telling audiences that the people had long ago left the place?
Another question: When will they begin to understand things?
I address this question not to the Russians but to the French, Germans, and Brits. When will they finally realize that there is a country called Ukraine and that it wouldn’t hurt to know the difference between Ukraine and Russia, and to have interpreters who know Ukrainian? After all, they closely followed the Orange Revolution, and they must have an aversion to all that garbage on the air.
This isn’t your average question, but it has an answer. They will get it when we become fully aware that we are a class act, talented, and cool — and by we I mean not all but some of us, because most of us, being many and invincible, realized this in November (some did even in 1999).
They will get it when, for example, the members of the administration of the Cinema, Theater and Television University, instead of supplying students with defective film or telling them how underfunded they are, arm themselves with chains and handcuffs, and chains themselves and the minister of culture (who refused to help Ihor Strembitsky even with tickets to Cannes) to the doors of the presidential secretariat and the cabinet, threatening to stay there unless they are given funds to develop our cinema. But if the university administration continues to place major emphasis on creating wall newspapers, attending physical education courses, and staging skits in the run-up to holidays, one is bound to ask what they are being paid for out of the taxpayers’ pockets.
They will get it when the government starts crawling before our celebrated film director Kira Muratova, and then her productions will be promoted as Ukrainian films, not Russian ones.
They will get it when our number-one “humanitarian millionaire,” instead of financing amateur videos made by professional screwups mistakenly regarded as “artists,” launches a cinematography relief fund and subsidizes the next production by Muratova or Strembitsky, or Ihor’s teacher, the brilliant documentary film maker Bukovsky.
If this happens, there will be Ukrainian interpreters in Cannes for the awarding of the Palme d’Or, or the Lion in Venice, or the Leopard in Locarno, or the Bear in Berlin.
