Photo: Anita Kopylenko
On Sunday, Cultural Workers Studio did just that, organising a screening of Chasova's films and a fundraising charity event. My colleagues organised individual activities that could be customised to suit attendees - including mystical fortune-telling from actor Olha Bohachevska, sound production consultation from producer Axxi Oma, an underground marketplace from manager Oynnet Piliuhina, portrait photography from artist Anita Kopylenko, and crafts from actor Hannah Liashenko - as well as Sandwich Art from yours truly.
Image: Anita Kopylenko (screen capture)
At a screening later in the day, I was privilaged to introduce Chasova's works Supper (2021) and a rough cut of the work-in-progress film How to Play a War (2024-). The texts are published below.
Thank you to the Berliners that came out and supported us, and people who donated from afar!
--
Tonight we are proud to present a short film and rough cut from Anna Chasova – the first is called Supper, 2021, 10´, which will be followed by a rough cut preview of How to Play a War (2024-, 16´).
Anna Chasova (2001) is a Ukrainian filmmaker from Zaporizhzhia, based in Kharkiv. She is a graduate of the Kharkiv State Academy of Culture’s Directing department, as well as a LitOsvita in screenwriting and playwriting, successfully defending her first feature-length documentary B.2 as part of the graduating process in 2023. She is a recipient of the FILMBOOST scholarship from Docudays UA and the Deutsche Filmakademie, attending the DocLab PolandUkraine programme at the Krakow International Film Festival and working together with the theatre Chesni Tobi as an actor touring cities in the south of Ukraine, as well as appearing in the music videos of Serhiy Zhadan. Her previous works have included the short documentary “Поля стійкості” (Fields of Resilience), short film “Сім новел про вбивство дитини” (‘Seven Short Stories about the Murder of a Child, 2021), and the films we will watch this evening.
She has a press card from the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and currently works teaching teenagers in Kyiv and Kharkiv, as well as working on film projects related to the 2022 fill-scale invasion of Ukraine. An emerging filmmaker, Anna was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer in late 2024, for which she is currently undergoing her first round of treatment.
Supper, 2021, 10´ is a one-shot film taking place in a conventional student dorm in Kharkiv city, Ukraine. The film follows a typical hopeless evening in the dormitory kitchen of the characters, who are young idle gangsters typical of their generation, loafing around, complaining about their lives or their daily events in guttural disgusting russian language. As Vova (Volodymyr Vinnik) narrates his day posing as a mascot of the animated cartoon Luntik, and Sergey (Sergey Rosyanok) works on his bucket-bong, degenerate Anton (Anton Starostin) sits reserved in the corner, dwelling. The resentment builds, only to explode into the final, furious diatribe, reprimanding them with a vengeance for going nowhere in their lives.
"As well as masquerading as a low-brow realist comedy, the
film’s largely improvised dialogue has a precisely-constructed storyline that
contains many references to the “Last Supper” of Jesus Christ" (on 'Supper', 2021).
As well as masquerading as a low-brow realist comedy, the film’s largely improvised dialogue has a precisely-constructed storyline that contains many references to the “Last Supper” of Jesus Christ, with biblical references mixed in with popular culture of Luntik and dialogues with the matron. Additionally, you can have a look out for the credits of our own Ann Krekhno in the sound design, and I want to also note that myself and Natalie Krekhno did the subtitles for this when the film was first presented in the Charity Screening of Ukrainian Short Films which Cultural Workers Studio organized together with Ballhaus ReUse in Berlin, August 2022. The film contains a lot of slang and it was great fun trying to translate this.
A gentle reminder that this film is in russian language and this is considered by the filmmaker to be problematic, and the problems with this were not discussed mindfully prior to the 2022 Full-Scale Invasion. I understand that the filmmaker takes some distance from the film these days for this reason, and considers this to be a mistake. Today, I hope you can anyway appreciate the filmmaking and great performances in the film.
It should also be noted that many of the actors are serving directly or indirectly in the Ukrainian Armed Forces since 2022.
Enjoy.
How to Play a War (2024-) is an ongoing documentary project about the Kharkiv Puppet’s Theatre’s resilience during the first stages of the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
When the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, Anna Chasova, then 21, took refuge in the Kharkiv Puppet Theatre. There she had been working on a documentary about the theatre’s staging of German playwright Bertholdt Brecht’s Mother Courage, a famous anti-war play, in a version discussing the ongoing russian-backed war in the Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine. The premier date of that play was to be Februrary 24th, 2022. That premiere never came.
Mixing footage from the pre-war preparations of the play with the community-formation that happened after the invasion began, Chasova constructs her story around the puppet-designer Natalia Denysova, a long-term servant of the theatre making puppets for 40 years. As Chasova states in her introduction at the Krakow International Film Festival Film Market: “I was impressed by the skills of the production team, who did not get applause or recognition (like the director). I decided to start filming them: I met Natalia, the chief stage designer. I was fascinated by her wisdom, humor, and openness to the world. She told me they were planning a premiere of Mother Courage, as a big reflection on the war in eastern Ukraine that started in 2014.”
Chasova lived in the theatre for 1 year, together with Natalia and the production team, shooting amongst the volunteer work and daily shelling that became the daily routine. As the Puppet Theatre became an informal, impromptu hub for people to gather in safety, it emerged as a microcosm of a city under daily terror attack from outside forces, continually interrupting the safe space of the stage. The theatre developed into a cocoon, sheltering people with love, care, and imagination, as so many places have done throughout the full-scale invasion.
"As the Puppet Theatre became an
informal, impromptu hub for people to gather in safety, it emerged as a
microcosm of a city under daily terror attack from outside forces, continually
interrupting the safe space of the stage" (on 'How to Play a War', 2024-).
To leave you again with words from Chasova: “It's about Courage. About Mother Courage, about Kharkiv Courage and about the courage of one woman. This is a film whose style I call the poetry of observation. Time is the most important feature of cinema for my favourite directors such as Christopher Nolan, and here, time passes and is changed as the characters change and transform, both on-stage and off-stage, the workers, and the puppets themselves. Dialogue that was never read, piano music that was never heard, and puppets that were never animated are brought to life on the screen.”
This film is shown here as a rough cut, with languages spoken by the workers in russian, surzhyk, and Ukrainian language with English subtitles automatically-generated.
Thank you and enjoy the film!
.jpg)
Photo: Anita Kopylenko
Donations to Anna Chasova can still be made via Paypal to the following address: krekhnoann@gmail.com (Please mark it clearly).
No comments:
Post a Comment