On the eve of the 79th Venice Film Festival, where his powerful documentary on Ukraine’s war “Freedom on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom” will be screened out of competition on September 7, Oscar-nominated director Evgeny Afinevsky was in a frantic race against time.
The footage was still being filmed in Ukraine in the second week of August, with Aveneevsky completing the film only on August 31 – the same day Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed celebrities and the foreign press at the festival’s opening ceremony, urging the world not to forget the war in Ukraine with the fervent appeal: “Don’t turn your back on us.”
While Hollywood stars like Julianne Moore, Adam Driver and Tessa Thompson lit the red carpet in Venice and Timothée Chalamet sparked Shla’s obsession with Lido, Avenevsky has been working around the clock to make sure the world still watches Ukraine.
“It is important not to avoid the fact that the war is still going on,” says the director. diverse. “It’s important to use our ability as filmmakers coming from Hollywood to shine a light on these stories, when the world sees them less on their television screens.”
The Israeli-American director has been nominated for an Academy Award for his 2015 documentary “Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s War for Freedom,” a true-to-life picture modeled after the mass demonstrations in Kyiv’s Maidan Square that toppled autocratic pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych in the winter of 2014.
His latest film, which serves as a companion piece, not only recounts the current war with harrowing accounts of survivors and graphic footage, but shows how the events of that winter – which led Russian President Vladimir Putin to seize Ukraine’s Crimea region and foment rebellion in Ukraine. Its eastern provinces – led directly to the present day. Avenevsky describes it as “an opportunity to document the next chapter of [Ukraine’s] The fight for freedom.”
Ukrainian civilians inside an improvised bomb shelter in Freedom on Fire.
Courtesy of Andrei Dubchak
Born in Russia and residing in Los Angeles, Avenevsky proudly displays the Ukrainian flag that flew over Maidan Square during the 2014 revolution inside his home. He spent the first days after the Russian invasion on February 24 in “disbelief,” insisting that “it was hard to believe that Russia attacked Ukraine in such a brutal way,” despite having no illusions about Putin’s regime.
Within days, he felt a call to action. “You realize that history is happening, and you need to document it for future generations,” he says. In today’s world, people sometimes rewrite history. And I wanted to preserve this history as it happened.” He adds that it is the history of “a nation determined to fight to the last drop of blood for its homeland.”
Since the completion of Winter on Fire, which is available to stream on Netflix, Afinevsky has been in touch with much of the team behind the Oscar-nominated movie. As Russian forces advanced across the country this past February, the director quickly began reaching out to his Ukrainian colleagues, many of whom were fleeing – or trying to document – the war.
It was a huge task. “Winter on Fire,” says Avenevsky, one place, one city. To chronicle the Russian war in real time, the director will enlist more than 40 cinematographers spread across Europe’s second largest country. (“If you want to make it fast, you need to be everywhere,” he says.) He will also collaborate with nine editors, three production managers, and more than two dozen animators and animators, most of whom still live and work in Ukraine. “I tried by all means to support my colleagues who are out there, because I know how difficult it is for them,” he says. “It is important for me to be with them and with them.”
Director Evgeny Avinevsky, nominated for an Oscar.
In early March, Avnevsky flew to Poland, which shares a border with Ukraine, and headed into the heart of the storm. This was the first of several trips to the frontline as he tried to juggle the requirements of filming and cutting the film simultaneously.
The director and his team came face to face with the chaos and violence of war. In one scene of the documentary, a Russian bomb falls just steps away from the filming crew’s location. Their footage is unwavering: lifeless bodies litter the streets of Bucha, a Kyiv suburb that was the site of a notorious massacre by Russian troops; The tense and terrifying moments inside a theater in the port city of Mariupol before a Russian air strike killed nearly 600 civilians sheltering there.
But alongside these atrocities they document stories of hope, determination and defiance. The film begins with a stand-up comedy show inside a bomb shelter. Among the Ukrainians reviewed are doctors, soldiers, religious leaders and reporters – the film is dedicated to “all journalists, filmmakers and members of the press who have been killed and who risk their lives” in the world’s conflict zones – as well as elderly people and mothers struggling to protect their children, other witnesses and survivors of the Russian attack that relentless.
Avenevsky saw this determination firsthand while filming the 2014 revolution, when protesters on Maidan Square for nearly a hundred days and – despite brutal repression by the authorities – eventually forced Yanukovych to step down.
“I met the resilience of the Ukrainian people in Maidan. From the first day of this invasion, I said… From my experience, being with the Ukrainians on Earth, they will never let that happen,” says Avinevsky. They will never give up. They will die standing up – not on their knees.”
[ad_2]
