You're reading: Ukrainian Locarno winner faces new challenge in Rotterdam

It’s not the first time that a prestigious international film festival selected a film by movie talented Ukrainian director Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy for its program. And it wasn’t the first time that the director’s same movie has received such an honor. 

Yet
Slaboshpytskiy’s “Nuclear Waste” – a silver medalist at the Locarno film
festival in Switzerland – found recognition at the Rotterdam
International Film Festival.

The Rotterdam selection holds special meaning for the 38 years old Ukrainian movie maker.

“They were
giving out the list of participants in portions and it was just torture,”  Slaboshpytskiy says.

To his relief,
and what seemed like eternity, Slaboshpytskiy’s name finally appeared on the festival’s
shorts program list on Jan. 17. “Rotterdam is not just a film festival, there
is something religious in it and there is no way one can explain this – just
feel,” he said.

The 42nd
Rotterdam Film Festival contains 6 programs and only two of them are
competitive.    The Spectrum shorts program
includes the most important, in the festival’s opinion, films that were
released during the year, many of which received awards at other festivals, Slaboshpytskiy
explains.

In 2011, the director
submitted his short film Deafness to Rotterdam, and as he says, came back to
his “native planet” last year.

That’s how he
described the festival himself.  “I just
couldn’t help going to Rotterdam, though I hate travelling,” Slaboshpytskiy
says. “But in Rotterdam it feels like you got into some movie fans cult and you
actually enjoy it. It feels like finally finding your native planet,” he laughed.

Slaboshpytskiy
submitted his 23-minute film Nuclear Waste, about a man and woman trying to
live their normal lives in the Chernobyl alienation zone,  previously to the Locarno Film Festival,
Molodist Film Festival in Ukraine, Kinoshok Film Festival
2012, 2in1 IFF, both in Russia and ZINEBI 2012 in Spain.

The
Dutch panelists were impressed: “Sad and hopeful… effective, austere, yet
also moving fiction… beautifully shot, restrained and touching,” the review
on the festival’s official website reads.

Slaboshpytskiy says he is very excited to know how the
Rotterdam audience will perceive his movie. 
“That audience comes to the festival with the huge enthusiasm, besides
that the variety of films they watch there is incredible, we can’t even dare to
think about such a variety in Ukraine,” he says. “That’s why the Rotterdam
festival will be kind of a strength test for my film,” Slaboshpytskiy
explained.

Kyiv Post staff writer Daryna Shevchenko can be reached at [email protected].