Famine '33 (Holod-33) is the first feature film about the 1932-33 famine in Soviet Ukraine. In the course of the famine, known as the Holodomor, deliberately organized on Kremlin orders to force the Ukrainian peasantry into collectivization, millions of people lost their lives. It is not surprising that public discourse on the subject was discouraged in the Soviet Union and film director Oles Ianchuk had to adapt the 1963 book Zhovtyi kniaz (The Yellow Prince) by Ukrainian émigré author Vasyl' Barka (1908). - 2005), and seek help from American historian James E. Mace (1952-2004), executive director of the US Commission on Ukraine Famine in the late 1980s, in an attempt to strike a balance between facts and license art by making a screen version of this historic event. These events are shown through the fate of Katrannyk's fictional family (a husband, a wife, a mother-in-law and three children), of whom only one, a boy named Andrii, survives the famine.
In the atmosphere of starvation-inflicted madness, suicides and cannibalism that afflict the native village of Katrannyks, other family members die, one by one, either from shock caused by their last supplies being confiscated, or a victim of kidnapping (to be cannibalized). ), whether shot while begging for flour in a heavily guarded mill, or from other but equally brutal causes. Local communists have a particular reason to dislike the Katrannyks, accused of being "kulak stooges" (pidkurkul'nyky in Ukrainian), an expression aimed at the poorest peasants who refused to join a collective farm. Communists believe, not without reason, that the Katrannyks hide an expensive holy grail from a local church, looted by atheist activists, and first torture their husband Myron (played by Heorhii Moroziuk) and then try to coerce his wife Odarka (Halyna Sulyma) in the confession, giving him a loaf of bread and promising to find the missing family members. The location of the chalice was a secret to the Communists. The film does not question the decision to hide the chalice at the cost of letting the whole family perish (they could, on the contrary, have sold it in a Torgsin store in exchange for so urgently needed food), but at least the doubt of that Myron and Odarka will deliver it lends a certain additional drama to the film that otherwise consists of a "series of frames [...] [with] no conventional character development" (Stephen Holden, The New York Times, December 15, 1993).
The debut of Ianchuk's feature film, Hunger33 was shot appropriately, in black and white, on location in the Kyiv, Chernihiv and Poltava regions. Color was used only in the few contrasting scenes depicting the appearances of the deceased, or the pre-famine, happy and abundant Ukraine. Many black-and-white sequences, sparse in dialogue, clearly struggled to achieve a news-style effect to compensate for the lack of real imagery associated with hunger. At the same time, the episodes of torture, as well as the cremation of the dead and seriously injured in unmarked mass graves, could only invite emotionally charged comparisons with the widely available visual evidence about Nazi crimes against humanity, the cruel irony that is the unspeakable treatment of famine victims by the Soviet authorities predated the Nazi crimes. At the end of the film, Andrii asks an elderly, malnourished homeless man he meets by chance where all the villagers are, "Did the plague take them?" "It's not the plague, it's the state," comes the reply. Two individuals are singled out in particular as personally responsible for the famine: Viacheslav Molotov (Head of the Extraordinary Commission for the Delivery of Grain to Ukraine at the time) and Lazar Kaganovich (an emissary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party charged with accelerating collectivization). Ianchuk even intended to send a copy of Famine '33 to Kaganovich, but the latter died shortly before its completion. Admittedly, the film's political message is neither subtle nor complex (the apocalyptic images in Barka's book did not make it to the screen).
However, it must be said that access to many archival documents related to the famine was only granted to historians after the film's release and scholarly debate over the precise meaning and scope of these documents is still ongoing, while the film was released. filmed from the point of view of ordinary Ukrainians who had no way of knowing whether the famine happened intentionally, or through mismanagement, or a combination of these, but tended to personalize issues. Fully aware of the explosive nature of the film's content (some of Ianchuk's colleagues at Dovzhenko Studios thought he might be arrested when the August 1991 Putsch took place), the director sought independent funding from the project's inception to minimize the danger. of potential interference from censors. Through various newspapers, Ianchuk appealed to the population for sponsorship (and thus ushered in the era of Ukrainian independent film). The response was overwhelming. The film also received substantial financial backing from a commercial bank in the Transcarpathian region called Lisbank, which agreed to lend the funds to Ianchuk on the condition that he later recover them from the film's proceeds. However, when bank representatives saw the film in 1991 at the first All-Ukrainian Film Festival in Kiev (where Famine '33 received the top prize), they decided to forgive the debt and asked the director to guarantee that the film would arrive. to the widest possible audience. On November 30, 1991 (the night before Ukraine's independence referendum), Famine '33 was broadcast by a leading Ukrainian television channel, after Yanchuk had waived the broadcast fee. Since then, the film has been shown regularly on Ukrainian television, entered Ukraine's school curriculum, and must have helped to form an influential public opinion that the 1932-33 famine was an act of genocide (as the Ukrainian Parliament declared in November 2006). The film's exposure abroad was also not negligible. It was shown at several international festivals, for example in Washington, Los Angeles and Moscow in 1992 and in Karlovy Vary and Brussels in 1998.
Recently, in February 2009, it received a Prix Henri Langlois Européen at the Vincennes Festival of heritage cinema and restored copies. Given that, in May 2009, the Public Ministry of the Public Ministry of Ukraine launched a criminal investigation against the perpetrators of the famine, it is unlikely that the relevance of Famine '33 will diminish anytime soon... Famine '33 (Holod-33) is the first feature film about the 1932-33 famine in Soviet Ukraine. In the course of the famine, known as the Holodomor, deliberately organized on Kremlin orders to force the Ukrainian peasantry into collectivization, millions of people lost their lives. It is not surprising that public discourse on the subject was discouraged in the Soviet Union and film director Oles Ianchuk had to adapt the 1963 book Zhovtyi kniaz (The Yellow Prince) by Ukrainian émigré author Vasyl' Barka (1908). - 2005), and seek help from American historian James E. Mace (1952-2004), executive director of the US Commission on Ukraine Famine in the late 1980s, in an attempt to strike a balance between facts and license art by making a screen version of this historic event. These events are shown through the fate of Katrannyk's fictional family (a husband, a wife, a mother-in-law and three children), of whom only one, a boy named Andrii, survives the famine. In the atmosphere of starvation-inflicted madness, suicides and cannibalism that afflict the native village of Katrannyks, other family members die, one by one, either from shock caused by their last supplies being confiscated, or a victim of kidnapping (to be cannibalized). ), whether shot while begging for flour in a heavily guarded mill, or from other but equally brutal causes. Local communists have a particular reason to dislike the Katrannyks, accused of being "kulak stooges" (pidkurkul'nyky in Ukrainian), an expression aimed at the poorest peasants who refused to join a collective farm. Communists believe, not without reason, that the Katrannyks hide an expensive holy grail from a local church, looted by atheist activists, and first torture their husband Myron (played by Heorhii Moroziuk) and then try to coerce his wife Odarka (Halyna Sulyma) in the confession, giving him a loaf of bread and promising to find the missing family members.
The location of the chalice was a secret to the Communists. The film does not question the decision to hide the chalice at the cost of letting the whole family perish (they could, on the contrary, have sold it in a Torgsin store in exchange for so urgently needed food), but at least the doubt of that Myron and Odarka will deliver it lends a certain additional drama to the film that otherwise consists of a "series of frames [...] [with] no conventional character development" (Stephen Holden, The New York Times, December 15, 1993). The debut of Ianchuk's feature film, Hunger33 was shot appropriately, in black and white, on location in the Kyiv, Chernihiv and Poltava regions. Color was used only in the few contrasting scenes depicting the appearances of the deceased, or the pre-famine, happy and abundant Ukraine. Many black-and-white sequences, sparse in dialogue, clearly struggled to achieve a news-style effect to compensate for the lack of real imagery associated with hunger. At the same time, the episodes of torture, as well as the cremation of the dead and seriously injured in unmarked mass graves, could only invite emotionally charged comparisons with the widely available visual evidence about Nazi crimes against humanity, the cruel irony that is the unspeakable treatment of famine victims by the Soviet authorities predated the Nazi crimes. At the end of the film, Andrii asks an elderly, malnourished homeless man he meets by chance where all the villagers are, "Did the plague take them?" "It's not the plague, it's the state," comes the reply. Two individuals are singled out in particular as personally responsible for the famine: Viacheslav Molotov (Head of the Extraordinary Commission for the Delivery of Grain to Ukraine at the time) and Lazar Kaganovich (an emissary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party charged with accelerating collectivization). Ianchuk even intended to send a copy of Famine '33 to Kaganovich, but the latter died shortly before its completion. Admittedly, the film's political message is neither subtle nor complex (the apocalyptic images in Barka's book did not make it to the screen). However, it must be said that access to many archival documents related to the famine was only granted to historians after the film's release and scholarly debate over the precise meaning and scope of these documents is still ongoing, while the film was released. filmed from the point of view of ordinary Ukrainians who had no way of knowing whether the famine happened intentionally, or through mismanagement, or a combination of these, but tended to personalize issues. Fully aware of the explosive nature of the film's content (some of Ianchuk's colleagues at Dovzhenko Studios thought he might be arrested when the August 1991 Putsch took place), the director sought independent funding from the project's inception to minimize the danger. of potential interference from censors.
Through various newspapers, Ianchuk appealed to the population for sponsorship (and thus ushered in the era of Ukrainian independent film). The response was overwhelming. The film also received substantial financial backing from a commercial bank in the Transcarpathian region called Lisbank, which agreed to lend the funds to Ianchuk on the condition that he later recover them from the film's proceeds. However, when bank representatives saw the film in 1991 at the first All-Ukrainian Film Festival in Kiev (where Famine '33 received the top prize), they decided to forgive the debt and asked the director to guarantee that the film would arrive. to the widest possible audience. On November 30, 1991 (the night before Ukraine's independence referendum), Famine '33 was broadcast by a leading Ukrainian television channel, after Yanchuk had waived the broadcast fee. Since then, the film has been shown regularly on Ukrainian television, entered Ukraine's school curriculum, and must have helped to form an influential public opinion that the 1932-33 famine was an act of genocide (as the Ukrainian Parliament declared in November 2006). The film's exposure abroad was also not negligible. It was shown at several international festivals, for example in Washington, Los Angeles and Moscow in 1992 and in Karlovy Vary and Brussels in 1998. Recently, in February 2009, it received a Prix Henri Langlois Européen at the Vincennes Festival of heritage cinema and prints. restored. Given that, in May 2009, the Public Ministry of the Public Ministry of Ukraine launched a criminal investigation against the perpetrators of the famine, it is unlikely that the relevance of Famine '33 will diminish anytime soon... Famine '33 (Holod-33) original film subtitled in Ukrainian and English: https://vk.ru/video626153897_456239018