It is time for our great surprise: the opening film of this year’s Docudays UA is the controversial Donetsk People’s Republic Or the Curious Tale of the Handmade Country. It is an important and excruciating film with 16+ age restriction. Why did we choose it? Every year, we raise the most pressing issues in the life of our country. We want to discuss our “here and now”, to analyze the causes of these phenomena and to forecast what lies ahead.
DPR, or the Curious Tale of the Handmade Country explores the separatist movement on the country’s East from its cradle, and is the only cinematographic evidence “from the other side”. Two desperate persons – Antony Butts, British director, and Anna Diskant, producer from Kyiv, have shot the film. We invite you to a serious film and a conversation with its brave authors after the screening. Please mark 20th of March, 7 p.m., Red Hall of the Cinema House, in your diaries. Screening of the opening ceremony and the opening film will be held simultaneously at Blue Hall of the Cinema House.
Free entrance.
In the meanwhile, listen to the advice of Ukrainian cinema critics.
Ihor Hrabovych, “Argument of Cinema”, 1+1
“The Donetsk People's Republic Or The Curious Tale of the Handmade Country by Antony Butts is interesting. It is surprising. It is humorous. And it is frightening".
Maryna Baranivska, “Telekrytyka”
"The opening film of Docudays UA-2015, DPR, or the Curious Tale of the Handmade Country (2014) by British documentalist Antony Butts is a prominent work, which deserves to be seen by the widest audience, and not only in Ukraine. As a person who already had an opportunity to watch this film, I can affirm: this is an amazing choice. This type of films Ukrainian society should watch and discuss today.
The film is really made with an incredible -approximation; this is a unique chronicle of the events that were occurring in Donetsk, for instance, near the region administration building and inside it, during April-May of 2014. And, at the same time, this is undoubtedly the cinematographer’s own view on the birth of a real chimera – the DPR.
“Hear Donbas”. Do you remember the times when this appeal was circulating in our information space? Antony Butts and Ukrainian producer Hanna Dyskant were listening to Donetsk citizens and their leaders and shooting them for six weeks, and they left the city only when they considered their further stay dangerous. As a result, the film contains minimum of off-screen text – the footage of the events of that “spring aggravation” in Donbas and Donetsk speaks for itself.
We see how restless unemployed adventurers (former tiler Roma, one of the film’s main characters, is one of them) and disoriented crowd, after watching huge amounts of Russian TV shows, have besieged themselves with tires, waiting for “slaughterers” from “Pravyi Sektor”, and have finally turned into armed fighters for “the people’s republic”. We also see what this pseudo state really is. We see how the individuals, who dare to remind the majorities about the very existence of Ukraine, become castaways.
The film by Anthony Batts is a careful observation of Donetsk protestants’ psychology, their understanding of what is going on, and their relationships. This detached observation is not devoid of special British sense of humor. This film is truly hypnotic. But this is also the reality, the bitter truth about what our country has been during the previous years of independence.
