A Love Story Set Amid Ukraine’s 20th Century Famine Hits The Big Screen
A Love Story Set Amid The Holodomor,
Like many cinematic love stories, Bitter Harvest features passionate kisses, vows of fidelity, and heart-wrenching scenes of separation as turmoil engulfs a pastoral homeland.
Think Doctor Zhivago, except instead of the Russian Revolution, this film is set during the Holodomor -- the famine that killed millions in
The film is being released (http://www.bitterharvestfilm.com/) -- in
Canadian-Ukrainian director
"It in some ways pays homage to Doctor Zhivago: The love story is up front, the Holodomor in the background," said Mendeluk, 68, whose film credits include the 1980 political thriller The Kidnapping Of A President.
But the film, featuring British actors
"The movie takes on a different dimension now, because even though in the film we talk about Stalin, and we show Stalin and how he orchestrated this artificial famine, what really is evident now is that, with the invasion of the
Untold On Film
Hearty peasant men scything golden sheaves of wheat. Ruddy-faced women lugging bags of grain on their backs to windmills standing under cloudless skies. A man and woman kissing passionately in a forest, giving way to scowling
These are some of opening scenes of the film, which tells a fictional story of an artistically inclined peasant boy named Yuri (played by Irons) who is separated from his childhood sweetheart Natalka (played by Barks).
He struggles to return to her as the
The film ends in 1933, when the death toll reached its climax.
Raised in
The year earlier he had married the daughter of a Ukrainian immigrant, leading him to travel to
Bachynsky-Hoover said he started drafting what would become Bitter Harvest, scribbling ideas down on napkins and studying the history of the period the story is set in, and the fate of his relatives.
"During the Orange Revolution, I found out, you know, that this country has suffered too much and that no one has ever done a film about the Holodomor," Bachynsky-Hoover said.
In 2008, three years after moving to
The government of then-Prime Minister
In 2011, Bachynsky-Hoover said he approached
"This was an opportunity, and there was a strong reason to make the West aware of the atrocities that Stalin had committed, and I thought it was particularly important to give the typical Western movie viewer some context about modern-day
The following year, Mendeluk said, he was contacted by Bachynsky-Hoover. With Ihnatowycz's financial backing, Mendeluk agreed to do the film.
The screenplay went through 12 different scripts before the writers settled on a final version, and filming began in the summer of 2013, Mendeluk said. Many of the key scenes of Ukrainian countryside and bucolic villages were filmed on the grounds of an outdoor ethnographic museum in Pyrohiv, a village located 45 minutes from
Oleksandr Pecherytsia, a Ukrainian actor who plays a peasant and best friend of the main hero, said he felt a special obligation in appearing the film. The stories it tells, he said, are the same stories that a dwindling number of older Ukrainians remember firsthand.
"I know about the Holodomor not from books but from the stories of my grandparents, who were forced to roam from one region to another," he said. "
A Tragedy Exposed
The subject of the famine of 1932-33, which struck many grain-producing areas of the
The result was that Ukrainians would suffer greater losses during the famine than any other Soviet republic. From 2.4 to 7.5 million Ukrainians died, depending on the source; some estimates push the toll even higher.
The famine was downplayed by Soviet authorities, but in the
The policy was "that this was sort of a vague bland Soviet tragedy. You emphasize the Russian, Kazakhs also died rather than admitting something specific had happened in
In recent years, the Russian government under President
Culture Minister
"Everything in the film is in its place: Stalin arranges the Holodomor especially for
In October of 2016, the Kremlin-backed news site Sputnik published a blunt opinion piece (https://sputniknews.com/politics/201510191028730561-holodomor-hoax-invented-hitler-west/) that asserted that the Holodomor was a hoax "invented by the West in close cooperation with Nazi
In
Despite the classification, there was no unanimity among members of the government. Yanukovych himself frequently downplayed any suggestion that the famine was engineered. His last education minister insisted the death toll was exaggerated (http://www.rferl.org/a/25274495.html), angering nationalists.
That attitude has changed not only because of the recent events in
"We are starting to create the story," Yevhen Nyshchuk,
Maidan Shoot
The film's final shooting in
Mendeluk, who helped write the final version of the screenplay in addition to directing, said his crew, which also shot in
He said he had to repeatedly remind his local crew not to focus on the shoot, not the demonstrations. Several regularly showed up to work smelling of burnt rubber, he said, from the tires set ablaze by protesters.
All the main figures behind the film insist that the timing of its release is coincidental. As Bachynsky-Hoover said, the story was conceived of more than a decade ago.
Still,
"Whatever the contemporary politics are, more than 3 million people starved to death in Soviet
But if the first impulse is to dismiss such stories as information warfare, "there's just something inhuman in that," he added. "I would say this: That it wouldn't be a bad thing if Russians, Ukrainians, and others knew a bit more about what happened in the 1930s."
RFE/RL Ukrainian Service correspondent
Copyright (c) 2011. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of
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