You're reading: Belgian director shoots fantasy film in Ukraine

Car garages are in ruins after shelling. Fires are burning all over. A frightened 11-year-old girl looks for a place to hide as a tank chases her. A teenage boy in a helmet and camouflage leans out of a broken armored motor car and tries to surrender.

“Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” he cries.

Suddenly another voice yells: “Stop! Awful! We need another take!”

The dramatic event is indeed only a scene. It takes place on the set of “Polina,” a fantasy feature film that is being co-produced by Ukraine, Belgium, and France. Shooting started on Nov. 1 in a residential area in the northeastern part of Kyiv and will continue until Nov. 25. The Kyiv Post visited the set on Nov. 7, as the shooting entered its second week.

After he interrupted the shooting, Olias Barco, Belgian movie director, ran up to the child actress playing the role of Polina.

“A tank is trying to crush you! And you’re almost laughing. Go! Get scared,” he commanded in French.

An interpreter translates his words for Polina Pechenenko, the Ukrainian child playing Polina.

With its €2 million budget, “Polina” is one of the most expensive Ukrainian movies ever made. Before that, “Povodyr” (2013) and “Firewalker” (2012) had budgets of $2 million. For “Polina,” half of the budget was provided by the Ukrainian studio and another half by the Belgian-French studio. The same goes for the crew and the cast – half are Ukrainians, and the rest came from Belgium and France.

Belgian director Olias Barco (R) gives acting tips to Polina Pechenenko on the set of fantasy film “Polina” on Nov. 7 at FILM.UA studio in Kyiv.

Barco has chosen Pechenenko as the lead actress in his family fantasy movie after three years of searching for the right 11-year-old.

“The script was written a long time ago. But I couldn’t find the girl I had pictured in my mind, neither in Belgium, nor in France, Italy or England,” Barco told the Kyiv Post.

He met Pechenenko when he visited the FILM.UA studio in Kyiv over the summer. She was one of the kids attending the studio’s cinema camp.

“And she was like that girl in my head,” Barco said.

“Polina” is the story of an 11-year-old girl who travels to the other side of the film screen of various famous movies, where she meets fairytale characters while searching for her lost parents.

The movie, which is being shot in English, is being co-produced by the French-Belgian company Wild Tribe Films and Ukraine’s FILM.UA.

The whole movie is being shot at the FILM.UA studio in Kyiv’s residential neighborhood of Troeshchyna in the city’s east-bank area.

The script was written by Belgian screenwriter Anouchka Walewyk, who came to Kyiv with the rest of the team but has barely seen the city. Every night after filming, she sits with the director to make corrections to the script.

Dennis Ivanov, one of the producers on the Ukrainian side, known as the producer of “The Tribe,” a 2014 award-winning movie by Myroslav Slaboshpytsky, was also on the set on Nov. 7.

“At first it was hard to work in an international film crew because of the language barrier and the mentality difference,” Ivanov said. “Our foreign colleagues didn’t understand the tradition of breaking a dish for luck before the start of shooting.”

The filming period of “Polina” is very short, just 24 days. The team is forced to rush because in December, the lead cameraman Thierry Arbogast, who worked with Luc Besson on “Lucy” (2014) and “The Fifth Element” (1997), needs to go back to France to start another movie with Besson, “Valérian and the City of a Thousand Planets.”

“I like it here, in Ukraine,” Arbogast said after filming was done for the day. “The crew is working fast and hard. My Ukrainian (assistants) are the best. But that is because I am the best.”

Polina is scheduled to premiere in 2016. After the tense shooting period, there will be three or four months of post-production.

Ivanov has a good feeling about how “Polina” will be received, although he says that the crew is working on the movie more for the sake of art than for money. Even renowned cameraman Arbogast is working for half of his usual fee, according to Ivanov.

Kyiv Post staff writer Veronika Melkozerova can be reached at [email protected]