This year best films of the competition program DOCU/LIFE together with her colleagues will be chosen by a Dutch director of Russian origin, Aliona van der Horst. Docudays team has long ago dreamt of inviting her to Ukraine. And finally this came true! Galya Vasylenko, a festival guide editor, speaks about the key which helps to get a clue to films directed by this talented film-maker. Further Aliona herself speaks about her return to Ukraine.
Aliona van der Horst studied Russian language and literature – she wanted to get a little closer to her native land which she left when she was a child. Strange as it may seem, but when you learn about her literary education everything fits together – as if it was a secret key to her films which explains such balanced inconsistency of poetry and documentary.
Practically each her film is a personal experience of the author: a few hours before the volcano eruption in Bam she told her husband that she would have liked to go there – this is how the film Voices of Bam was created; her father’s picture can be found in the film After the spring of ’68.
At the same time each Aliona’s film preserves its own rhythm, style, color and music scale. And virtually, this has little in common with a documentary film – only pain, or fear, or despair in the eyes of participants of the events, described by her, resemble a documentary.
The most famous film directed by Aliona van der Horst is a documentary film about a Russian poet Boris Ryzhy, a conjunction of music, poetry and a failed life story. For the director herself this film is also a landmark because it was a close acquaintance with realities of her native country. For Russian and Ukrainian audience the film is a milestone due to the plot and history which reflects our real life. This film was awarded as the best medium-length documentary film at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam in 2008 and as the best documentary film at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. Aliona van der Horst is a living classic whose works Docudays UA retrospective provides the opportunity to watch.
"May you live in interesting times." This Chinese curse pops up in my mind when I think about you, Ukrainians. To a documentary filmmaker, times like these are not only a curse, but also an opportunity. After all, we are witnesses to change and movement: in society, its consciousness, individual fates and emotions. It is all about movement: the word ‘emotion’ is derived from the Latin emovere, ‘movement in a certain direction’.
Life moves in spirals. I made my graduate film in Kyiv and Odesa. It was 1997, I met Semyon Gluzman, and he told me about the abuse of psychiatry for political reasons in the Soviet period. The result was The Lady with the White Hat. And later, a short film about the friendship between Semyon Gluzman and his former enemy, a KGB general. Now, 18 years later, I return to Kyiv for a small retrospective.
World history and personal human destinies are intertwined. That’s a red thread running through my films. When I made a film about the Hermitage museum, I was not so much interested in the works of art, but rather in the ‘Ermitazhniks’, who saved the artworks during times of war and repression, and art, in its turn, saved their lives. Boris Ryzhy is not only about a poet in the crucial times of perestroika, but also a portrait of a lost generation. And Voices of Bam gives voice to those who are learning to live again after an earthquake in their hometown.
We are going through a transitional period, a period of movement, and our children will tell their children about it. In the past, we told stories while sitting around the campfire. Nowadays we go to film festivals, but the stories are universal. And these stories will be told again in the next generation. When the poet Boris Ryzhy was asked what the theme would be for his new poem, he answered, “About life, love and death. There are no other themes."
Aliona van der Horst, Film director
