Will Kyiv be left without Molodist?

Andrii Khalpakhchi, the veteran head and currently artistic director of the Molodist Festival does not rule out that the festival may move elsewhere. The reason is traditional and banal: lack of funds. The mayor’s office owes the festival 80,000 hryvnias under last year’s contract, so Khalpakhchi threatened a lawsuit at a press conference this October. The city’s chief directorate for culture has pay off the debt, but this doesn’t solve the problem. In an interview with www.glavred.info Khalpakhchi stressed that “this year the Kyiv administration hasn’t allocated one kopiika for the festival. Of course, our budget is thus limited. We are doing many things at the expense of our partners and sponsors.”

The situation is apparently quite serious. Khalpakhchi says, “We are thinking about removing the word ‘Kyiv’ from the name of the 40th international festival and about holding the next festival in a different city. We have been invited to hold it in Lviv because its municipal authorities are interested in this cultural event. If Kyiv doesn’t need this festival, we’ll have to consider transferring it to a city whose administration is interested in culture.

It would be illogical for the Cannes Film Festival to be held without the involvement of the municipal authorities, just as the Berlin Festival is unthinkable with the mayor of Berlin.”

When asked by The Day, Khalpakhchi reaffirmed his intentions and added that Molodist has faced such problems for a number of years.

In fact, financial problems emerge every year, when promises are made and then never kept on the municipal level and all the way to the ministerial level, despite the fact that Molodist has long made its name; it is well known abroad and is on all lists of world film festivals. Every year Khalpakhchi and his team bring to Ukraine European and world movie stars and film directors (on October 24 Catherine Deneuve came for the opening of the 39th International Cinema Festival Molodist – Ed.). The festival also features unique productions that are not screened anywhere else. In a word, Molodist is one of few cultural institutions amidst our lasting chaos that is not only actually functioning but is also worthily representing Ukraine abroad. However, the impression is that our bureaucrats prefer to ignore this and, even worse, are trying to elbow Molodist out of Kyiv.

Let us hope that the fears expressed by the artistic director of Molodist will prove to be unfounded. Khalpakhchi’s organizational and managerial talents enable this festival to evolve and add to its prestige with each passing year without any help from the state.

The sad fact remains that the local authorities of any civilized city regard supporting big-time film festivals and other cultural events as their duty, as well as a matter of honor.

The opposite attitude can only be described as barbaric and absurd. Proceeding from the maxim that every people has the kind of government it deserves, do we really have to take orders from a bunch of ignorant savages?