The first thought that comes to mind after watching “The Guide,” a recent Ukrainian movie that came out on Nov. 12, is how well-timed it is.
“The Guide,” a movie that Ukraine has pitched for the Academy Awards’ Best Foreign Language Film, shows one of the most tragic pages of Ukrainian history – mass repression and destruction of Ukrainian culture in the 1930s. The film’s director Oles Sanin focused on the lives and summary liquidation of the kobzars – traditional folk bards who played the kobza, a traditional stringed musical instrument.
The Ukrainian kobzars traced their history to cossack times. Usually blind and escorted by guides, they made a living by travelling from village to village to play old folk songs and narrate popular ballads. In the 1930s the Soviet authorities put an end to them.
The film tells the story of a 10-year old American boy, Peter Shemrok, who comes to the Soviet Union together with his father Michael Shemrok in the early 1930s. The father plans to set up a business, but he is murdered by the Soviet secret police. Left alone in a hostile foreign state, Peter meets blind musician Ivan Kocherha and becomes his guide. The two travel Ukraine on foot, witnessing the harsh life of common Ukrainians under the Communist regime.
Soviet authorities considered the disabled kobza players enemies of the state, since these Ukrainian Homers were reminding common folk about their heroic past, while the authorities were working to destroy it. The precise number of bards shot by the Soviet secret police in the 1930s remains unknown, although historians estimate that at least 337 kobzars were executed in the winter of 1934.
The mass slaughter of the kobzars is the climax of the movie. Before that, Sanin speaks in metaphors. He sets most scenes in the autumn, hinting that Ukrainians and Ukrainian culture were gradually disappearing like the leaves falling from the trees. The film reveals how the authorities would kill theater actors in Kharkiv, ban religion, and force villagers to join collective farms. On Joseph Stalin’s order, the authorities confiscated all the food of the Ukrainian peasants, resulting in the mass starvation of millions today known as the Holodomor.
While streets of Kharkiv are crowded with hungry, emaciated children, made orphans by the genocide, the life of the secret police officers is shown to be obscenely luxurious.
The filmmakers accurately captured the Zietgeist. Sanin invited 60 visually disabled people who are not professional actors to recreate how a kobzar looked and gestured more realistically. The movie shows the bards’ way of life, customs and even their secret language.
The excellent performance by Stanislav Boklan as Kocherha deserves special praise. To get into a blind man’s head, Boklan wore special contact lenses that blocked his sight during the filming and would not remove them between takes.
Rejecting defeat is the leitmotif of the movie. Kocherha, now captured and tortured by the secret police, understands that his destiny is determined. After incredible suffering, he says to his executioners, “When you put me on a spike, make it a low one so it is easy for you to kiss my ass!”
The film’s budget was Hr 16.6 million, although the price would have gone up had volunteers not provided the filmmakers with free soundstage time.
“The Guide” won two awards at the International Film Festival in Odesa in July, and will be shown in competition at film festivals in Warsaw, Goa, Torun, and Kyoto.
Sanin presented his movie in the U.S. last September.
“After watching the film foreigners tell me that they finally understood why Ukrainians started EuroMaidan and were ready to fight riot police armed with nothing but wooden shields,” Sanin said at the premiere in Oscar cinema in Kyiv on Nov. 11.
The shooting of the movie started eight years ago, and Sanin never imagined that the film would become so timely in Ukraine, which now suffers from artificial separatism, an atmosphere of fear and lies, as well as depreciation of human life and dignity brought by Russia-backed militants in the east of the country and Crimea.
“The Guide” will be presented at the Ukrainian Cultural Center in Chicago on Dec. 5 with English subtitles. It runs in Kyiv theaters in Ukrainian.
Kyiv Post staff writer Nataliya Trach can be reached at [email protected]
