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The Cultural Forum “Transcending Borders: GaliciaKult”
Cinema program

Kharkiv | 01.10.2016-31.10.2016

How were the old and new worlds of the territories that were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire built and what place did Galicia occupy among them? How did the Soviet annexation of Galicia, Northern Bukovina and Transcarpathia take place in 1939–1945, and what role did cinema play in their “integration”? Why is Ukrainian poetic cinema compared to masterfully painted frescoes? How can "ordinary people" draw attention to and preserve shared memory? And what do we do with the knowledge burden in our memory? How did multi-ethnic Galicia turn into an almost monoethnic territory and how did the outlines of small towns and their former inhabitants dissolve over time? How did the First World War pass through Galicia and what burden did it leave behind? How do Carpathian shepherds, Lviv batyars or Lviv rockers live and or lived before? All this and much more was discussed using the language of documentary and feature films.

After long discussions, we chose only those films that represented key moments in the entire complex and long history of Galicia and gave the audience a basic idea – about the Austrian past, about inclusion in the Polish context, about the Soviet era and the present.

The program consisted of classic and modern films of very different formats and genres. For example, the Polish film adaptation of Bruno Schulz's works ("Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass"), the documentary tour of Ukraine by an Austrian guide ("One World"), poetic cinema ("White Bird with a Black Mark"), military drama about the First World War ("Austeria") or the current hit of Ukrainian documentary ("The Living Bonfire").

Each film show was accompanied by either an introductory lecture or post-factum comments by researchers, and a discussion as a must-have part. The venues for the film shows were art galleries, the Lacan intellectual bar and the DK ART AREA creative space.

Presentation of the cinematic present was also an important part of the program: what is Wiz-Art short film festival about? What does the Lviv Film Commission do and why is it important for Lviv to promote itself as a place for filming? These meetings helped to establish a number of contacts for further cooperation at the level of short films between Lviv and Kharkiv.

The film program also presented projects created during the Art Residences: a children's animated work "Fantastic Country" and an almanac of short documentaries about Kharkiv ("Kharkiv through the hero") created by novice directors from Kharkiv and Lviv.

Curators

  • Maria Voronchuk

    Maria Voronchuk

    Public activist. Director. Until 2014, she worked in Donetsk in a public organization and various cultural projects. She took an active part in organizing events in the field of cinema. Co-organizer of the First Night Film Festival of Children's and Youth Cinema "May 32". Organizer of the traveling documentary film festival on human rights "Docudays UA" in Donetsk in 2013. Moderator of the Docudays UA documentary film club in Lviv. She worked with us as a curator of DonCult's entertainment programs in Lviv and GalitsiaCult in Kharkiv.

Video of the project(9)