Blast from the past - Taras Bulba

A great movie that was ahead of its time. Too bad there weren't more like it produced.

Maybe if there were, the West would not be so ignorant about Ukrainian history that most, especially the media, have no clue what is going on now, much less understand the dire consequences of throwing Ukraine under the bus.

Anyway, enjoy the movie clips and the background tune, Розпрягайте хлопці коні (Unharness the Horses, boys) by the group Ekspress.

Living with the aftermath of Chernobyl

Chornobyl (also Chernobyl), site of the world’s worst nuclear accident, is one of the most radioactive areas on the planet.

According to an April 26, 2006 article in The Guardian, the fallout damage was roughly the equivalent of 400 Hiroshima nuclear bombs. 

When the core of reactor number four at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded on April 26, 1986  it caused fires, a nuclear meltdown, and sent out a radioactive cloud that blanketed Ukraine, Belarus, Scandinavia and Western Europe.

The official Soviet death toll was 31 people. However in reality, the actual toll is more likely in the area of 250,000 and rising.

Soviet authorities had hoped (and tried) to keep the world ignorant of the accident. However, word soon began to spread via amateur (HAM and shortwave) radio, confirming the source of the sudden and substantially increased amounts of radiation in the atmosphere.

The Chernobyl nuclear disaster drastically transformed the lives of thousands of people in Ukraine and Belarus. Even today, Ukraine continues to cope with the long-term health, economic and environmental consequences of this preventable disaster.

Ukrainian American writer and film-maker Irene Zabytko is the author of The Sky Unwashed, a novel about the the elderly people who insist on living, as they always have, in their homes in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, the highly irradiated 30 kilometer area surrounding the site of the 1986 explosion. (Available through Amazon.)

She has also spent several years documenting this tragedy on film, featuring their lives in a documentary film she is spearheading, called Life In The Dead Zone.

Irene and her film crew at Wheat Street Productions, Inc. have already released an award-winning film short, Epiphany At Chornobyl, based on the soon-to-be-released documentary. Here's the trailer:




More information about the film can be found at the film's website.

Irene is still in need of funding to complete her project. Please consider supporting her efforts with a donation.

On May 1, 2011, Irene was a guest on Nash Holos Ukrainian Roots Radio. We talked about her film and her travels to the Chornobyl Dead Zone to research and shoot the film. You can listen to the interview here.

Today is the 26th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

Human beings are not good at learning from the mistakes of the past. But at least on this day in history, once a year, let us not forget ... and let us not make light of the awful legacy it left behind.

Life in the Dead Zone - new film about living in Chernobyl today

So the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster has passed. And, par for the course, the world`s attention is waning.

Having made the inevitable comparisons to the nuclear disaster in Fukishima, Japan a mere two months ago, the international media has moved on to sensationalise more recent disasters and debacles.

Fair enough. It`s their job, and just common practice.

So the less common practice of delving deeper and trying to make sense of the devastation that rained down on the unsuspecting populace, and to (perhaps) help humanity to learn from its mistakes, falls to

New documentary film on Ukrainians in Quebec

The English-language documentary film Ukrainians in Quebec, has just been released on DVD in celebration of the 120th anniversary of Ukrainians in Canada (1891-2011). 

Filmmaker Yurij Luhovy with
his newly released DVD
Ukrainians in Quebec.
Photo: Adriana Luhovy

Produced, directed and edited by Yurij Luhovy, it tells the story of the Ukrainian settlement in Quebec from 1891 to 1945.



By means of rare, salvaged photographs and personal accounts, the 28 minute film depicts the formative years of the first two waves of Ukrainian immigration in Quebec: those who arrived before the First World War and those who came in the inter-war period.



Ukrainians in Quebec was originally released in 16 mm  in 1979 following four years of research, interviews and filming. It captures aspects of the cultural, organizational, religious and political development of the Ukrainian community in Montreal, as well as in Val d’Or, Rouyn Noranda and surrounding areas in Northern Quebec where many of the descendents of the original colonists still live.

Rich in still photographs and vintage film footage, the documentary also recalls the establishment of the Sheptytsky Colony at Lac Castagnier in the Abitibi region and is a lasting tribute to those early immigrant community builders no longer with us.

Interviews with French-Canadian eye-witnesses describe daily life at Spirit Lake internment camp. Footage shot of the original internment prison barracks still standing at the time is also shown.  



This documentary was the first film to expose the unjust internment of Ukrainians during WWI and place Spirit Lake internment in a wider context of early immigration to Quebec.

Ongoing screening of the documentary will be a permanent part of the Spirit Lake Internment Interpretive Centre to open in 2011.

Restoration of Ukrainians in Quebec was enabled in part with the financial support of the Shevchenko Foundation and the Camp Spirit Lake Corporation.

The original version was partially supported by the Department of Multiculturalism, Secretary of State.  



This was the first documentary made by filmmaker Yurij Luhovy who had just graduated from film studies at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia). It began his journey in documenting aspects of Ukrainian and Ukrainian-Canadian history so that knowledge of the past always remains a part of our present and future.

For further information or to order a copy of Ukrainians in Quebec contact Yurij Luhovy, MML Inc, 2330 Beaconsfield Ave., Montreal, Quebec, H4A 2G8. E-mail: mmlinc@hotmail.com. Tel. (514) 481 5871 or visit their website.  

Lord of War - fact-based fiction comes to life

A few weeks back my DH and I watched Lord of War.

If I'd had my way, we wouldn't have. But I'm glad we did.

It starts out a bit slow, and being chronically short on patience, I was ready to ditch it after a few minutes. My DH insisted I give it a chance so, just to get along, I did. Good thing, too. What a powerful movie!

Based (loosely) on real life characters, it's a real indictment of the arms trade. The acting is great. (It stars Nicholas Cage, after all!) And the story is gripping. So I found it a very memorable movie.

Nonetheless, I had immediate doubts about the accuracy of the Ukrainian references.

The protagonist is based on notorious gun-runner Viktor Bout. Nothwithstanding that the movie is of course fictional, to my mind it's nonetheless highly unlikely that a Ukrainian from the Crimea who emigrated to the U.S. in the 1970s or 80s would self-identify as a patriotic Ukrainian ... and at that, one who was ecstatic about what happened in 1991. (In real life, the Crimea is dominated by Russians hell-bent on returning the area to Mother Russia.)

It's also doubtful that a senior officer in the Soviet army who, after the Soviet Union collapsed, would later have access to stockpiled arms, would have been a patriotic ethnic Ukrainian ... especially since, according to Wikipedia, the uncle’s character is based on a real-life person, Oleg Orlov, who died in a Kyiv prison in 2007 while under investigation for smuggling arms to Iran.

I suppose these fictitious stretches make for a good story. But I dunno. I think it would have been a better story had it been closer to reality. Would you agree?

In a real-life twist, shortly after I saw the movie, a friend who is an expert on Ukrainian politics and current affairs, sent an email saying that Viktor Bout was being extradited to the USA. As an arms supplier to terrorists including Al Qaida, he may be implicated in 9/11.

There is some scuttlebutt that a deputy in Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada (parliament) ,Yuriy Bout, may be his brother. Yurij became a deputy after switching citizenship from Russian to Ukrainian and receiving his Ukrainian passport on the day before Gen. Yurij Kravchenko's two-bullets-to-the-head "suicide."

There's not a lot of information about Yurij Bout that I could find, at least not in English. As for Viktor Bout, given his arrest there will likely be follow up stories in the mainstream media similar to this and this and this.

In the meantime, despite the less-than-credible Ukrainian characterizations, I think it's still a movie worth watching (or watching again).

If you've seen it, I'd love to get your take on it.

If you haven't yet seen it, you can get the DVD at Amazon.

Here's the movie trailer.

New Holodomor film (in Ukrainian) by Canadian film-maker

I recently attended the Vancouver premiere of Montreal film-maker Yuriy Luhovy's latest documentary, "Okradena Zemlya: 1932-1933 Famine-Genocide." It took place at the Holy Trinity Ukrainian Orthodox Auditorium in Vancouver.

"Okradena Zemlya" translates into English as "Plundered Land." What I found different about this film from other Holodomor films is that watching it was like picking a scab off a sore too soon. Or, to word it more elegantly, reopening an old wound.

But the former description is really what it felt like for me. I can't talk with any credibility about re-opening wounds because my parents were Canadian-born toddlers when the Holodomor was happening, and all my (known) relatives had long since emigrated to Canada. So I didn't have a wound; I learned about the Holodomor in university in the 1980s. And while I was outraged and horrified, what I felt was just a surface cut compared to what survivors experienced, and carried with them, for decades.

Nonetheless, picking a scab off a cut that hasn't completely healed can hurt, and even bleed. And that is what I felt when I watched this film.

It wasn't just an academic recitation of the details of a horrific mass murder. The film portrayed the sense of hope and optimism that soviet socialism promised, particularly with the (short-lived) Ukrainianization of culture in the Ukrainian SSR. Then it depicted, vividly and graphically, the hope gradually dimming under the mounting sense of betrayal, disbelief, and abject horror that the people who lived (and died) through it would have experienced.

Somehow, Yurij was able to simulate that excruciating, gradual realization of what was happening, and the accompanying sense of utter helplessness. It was so stark that I couldn't even cry. I was numb.

The film was all in Ukrainian so, unfortunately, I missed a lot of the nuances. There's an English version planned, but funds are needed before it can be completed. Which is why Yurij is touring Canada with the film.

If you understand Ukrainian, even imperfectly, you need to see this film. If you missed the screening, buy a copy or two of the DVD and/or make a donation. An English version will get the message to more people, so that more will hopefully learn from it.

You can go to this website (here) for more information about the film. You can make a donation there as well as order this film and/or any of Yurij Luhovy's other excellent productions.

I was fortunate to be able to speak with Yurij by phone a couple of weeks before his arrival in Vancouver. The interview aired on Nash Holos on October 11 and features cuts from the soundtrack. If you missed it, you can listen to it here.