The Stanford Ukrainian Studies Program presents:

UKRAINIAN CINEMA NOW

a mini-festival on the Stanford campus, January 15-16, 2009

With Dr. Yuri Shevchuk, Director of the Ukrainian Film Club of Columbia University More information on the films may be found: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/ufc/

Program 1. Animated Shorts from Ukraine
Thurs., 1/15 at 12 noon, Encina Hall West 208

Streetcar Number Nine (Stepan Koval, 2002, 9 min.)
A humorous snippet of everyday life in a Ukrainian city. Winner of the Jury Prize Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival, 2003.

Poverty (Stepan Koval, 2005, 12 min.)
Happy days are over for a hard working family of Petro, Marichka and their two small sons, who live in the bucolic Carpathian Mountains.

Wandering Around (Anatoliy Lavrenyshyn, 2005, 10 min.)
A beautifully portrayed moment in one man’s inner life. The protagonist wanders into and out of reality.

Play for Three Actors (Oleksander Shmyhun, 2004, 10 min.)
A tear-jerking story of how true friendship, love, and commitment can help survive.

Snow Will Cover the Roads (Evhen Syvokin, 2005, 10 min.)

Program 2. Documentary Shorts from Ukraine
Thurs., 1/15 at 7 pm Building 370 room 370

There Was a Woman Who Lived in a Shoe (Olena Fetysova, 2005, 30 min.)
Homeless children can bee seen today in the streets of many Ukrainian cities. This film is about two wonderful people, the Tarnopolsky family who offer their own solution to this problem.

Shooting Gallery (Taras Tomenko, 2001, 10 min.)
From the Berlinale's Jury synopsis: "The Shooting Gallery is a portrait of a childhood in black and white. A raw poetic film whose dramatic use of light and shadow gives a painfully intense picture of its young hero.

Fiesta (Hanna Yarovenko, 2008, 28 min.)
A documentary featuring Ukrainian folk culture as it is fostered and continuously rediscovered in the countryside since independence.

Kolky (Natasha Mykhalchuk, 2008, 24 min.)
Nataliya Mikhalchuk's personal journey to the village of Kolky in Vinnytsia province of Ukraine to retrace the family history of her father's parents reveals a wealth of memories and eye-witness testimonies of the tragic history of Ukraine.

Program 3. Short Feature Films from Ukraine
Fri., 1/16 at 12 noon in Encina Hall West 208

Law (Vitaly Potrukh, 2008 28 min.)
The year is 1919. Ukrainian War for Independence. A Directoria cavalry picket never returned from a mission  to one of nearby villages. All its members are feared dead, betrayed to the invading Russian Bolshevik forces by local peasants.

Taxi-Driver (Roman Bondarchuk, 2006, 21 min.)
This exquisitely stylized gem of a film is about a strange unrequited love at first sight of a taxi driver who gives a lift to a beautiful and naïve girl on her way to studies at a “cable college.”

Tragic Love for Unfaithful Nuska (Taras Tkachenko, 2004, 20 min.)
The film, based on Yuri Vynnychenko's short story "A Grenade for Two," is a sepia-toned film that follows the antics of two young friends as they vie for the attention of the older, beautiful, girl-next-door Nuska.

Program 4. FEATURED DOCUMENTARY on the HOLODOMOR (UKRAINIAN TERROR FAMINE)
Fri., 1/16 at 7 pm in Building 370, room 370

The Living (2008, dir. Serhiy Bukovsky, 75 mins)
The film interlaces the Holodomor tragedy with the global upheavals of the early 1930s: the collapse of economy in the USA, Hitler's coming to power in Germany, Stalin's war with the peasantry. This last group was defending private property, so they either had to acknowledge defeat, or die. But in 1933 peasants were left with no choice. The Ukrainian problem any display of independent national policy was meant to be solved at the same time. The film also tells the story of Gareth Jones, a British journalist, whose investigative reporting was not heard in the West. Jones acts as a guide in this journey through history. Governments of numerous countries showed indifference to the suffering, even though they were informed about the situation in Ukraine. This is evident from numerous documents shown in the film. Stories of people who survived the Great Famine are interlaced with these documents and fragments of Gareth¹s diaries, which he kept during his trip to Ukraine in March of 1933 The US Premier of THE LIVING took place on December 2, 2008 at Columbia University.