You're reading: Ukrainian film wins Crystal Palace International Film Festival

The Soviets were famous for altering history to suit their political needs. Now a new Ukrainian film makes some historical tweaks to the story of a Russian revolutionary in the service of telling a fascinating story – and has won acclaim from the critics in doing so.

“My Grandmother Fanny Kaplan,” a biopic by Ukrainian director Olena Demyanenko, was named the best international film at the British Crystal Palace International Film Festival on Nov. 19.

The festival, which has been held every year since 2009, took place in a range of venues located in the south east of London from Oct. 29 to Nov. 19.

My Grandmother Fanny Kaplan (2016) – Trailer from Gagarin Media Film Company on Vimeo.

The film tells an alternative story connected to Russian revolutionary Feiga Roytblat, known as Fanny Caplan, who tried to assassinate Vladimir Lenin in 1918. She shot Lenin three times when he was leaving the Hammer and Sickle factory in Moscow after giving a speech to the workers who were staging a protest there. Lenin, of course, survived, and Kaplan was executed in the age of 28 in three days after the assassination attempt.

However, some historians doubt Kaplan was actually the one who shot Lenin, as she had almost been blind.

“Fanny Kaplan is one of the main anti-heroines of Soviet mythology, because she shot at Lenin,” Demyanenko told the Kyiv Post by phone on Nov. 23.

“But we know that history has been rewritten many times.”

The film tells the story of a journalist who travels to France to find the Kaplan’s grandson, who had kept her secret diary and found out the truth about the attempt on Lenin’s life. The biopic recounts the turbulent events of Kaplan’s life, starting from her childhood in Odessa, her membership in anarchist terrorist organizations, the prison term she served in Siberian labor camps, and her alleged affair with Dmitriy Ulyanov, Lenin’s brother.

Demyanenko‘s vision of Kaplan is almost totally at variance with the way Kaplan was depicted by the Soviet authorities. She portrays her as loving woman and a victim of the Soviet system that dehumanized people. Kaplan is played by Ukrainian actress Kateryna Molchanova.

“With the example of Fanny Kaplan we wanted to make the viewer contemplate the fact that slogans can change, but the most important thing that stays with us is love,” Demyanenko said.

The director also said that she didn’t want to create another myth about Kaplan, therefore film doesn’t give a direct answer to whether she was the one who shot at Lenin or not. She said that her main goal was to make the audience think critically about history.

Demyanenko produced her first films in the late 1990s. Another of her movies, “Violent Fantasy,” made in 1997, won the Golden Crown prize at the Casablanca International Film Festival in 1998. The director spent more than 10 years working on a Russian TV series in Moscow, but returned to her homeland in 2012. The same year, she founded Gagarin Media Film Company, which produced “My Grandmother Fanny Kaplan.”

Screenshot from "My Grandmother Fanny Caplan" film.

Screenshot from “My Grandmother Fanny Caplan” film.

The story was filmed in France and Ukraine. The crew started filming in April 2014 and was supposed to shoot in Crimea and at the north of Russia, but had to interrupt the filming because of Russia’s annexation of peninsula and war at the eastern Ukraine. They even had to shoot scenes about Kaplan’s term in Siberian labor camps in Kyiv.

Demyanenko said that because most of the film had to be shot in Ukraine, she decided to add the plot line about Lenin’s brother. The character is played by the famous Ukrainian director Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy, who directed “The Tribe,” a drama about an orphanage for deaf children that received three awards at 2015 Cannes Festival.
For his acting in “My Grandmother Fanny Kaplan” Slaboshpytskiy won a title of the best actor at the 2016 Odessa International Film Festival. The film was first screened at the same festival at the end of July this year.

Apart from in the U.K. and Ukraine, the film has been screened at the Cottobus Film Festival in Germany, and at the Days of Ukrainian Films events in Beirut, Lebanon, and Budapest, Hungary. The upcoming screened is planned at the International Film Festival of India in Goa, which kicks off on Nov. 20.

The film’s producer Dmitriy Tomashpolski said they are in negotiations with British channels to screen the movie in the U.K. after the film won the Crystal Palace International Film Festival.

The film will hit the theaters in Ukraine on Dec. 8.