In December, the DOCU/SPACE online cinema added four powerful documentaries to its collection. These films are now also available for free at Docudays UA film clubs.

These films are Euromaidan: The Rough Cut (dir. Volodymyr Tykhyi, Andriy Lytvynenko, Kateryna Gornostai, Roman Bondarchuk, Yulia Gontaruk, Andrey Kiselyov, Roman Liubyi, Oleksandr Techynskyi, Oleksiy Solodunov, Dmitry Stoykov); People Who Came to Power (dir. Oleksiy Radynski, Tomáš Rafa); Varta1, Lviv, Ukraine (dir. Yuriy Hrytsyna), and The Living (dir. Serhiy Bukovsky).

Euromaidan: The Rough Cut is an almanac of the three months of revolution, from the indignant protest to the popular unity. The film is interesting because it combines the works of many young Ukrainian directors who filmed the Maidan events — both its daily life and its crucial moments.

People Who Came to Power shows the gradual transition of the society from peaceful life to wartime. Filmed in March-April 2014 in Donbas, the documentary follows the transformation of a social protest into an armed uprising supported by the covert foreign invasion. Without focusing on individual stories, the film demonstrates the mechanisms of incitement to war, which lead to social collapse.

Varta1, Lviv, Ukraine uses the recordings of radio conversations between activist car patrols to ask a number of questions about the nature of the revolution. What is self-organization? How is democracy created? Who determines punishment? Where is the center and the periphery of revolution? Where does it start and where does it end? The brief moment of the power vacuum becomes the moment of the highest potentiality, when the ideas about the past and the strategies for the future are discussed. The film tries to look at the everyday spaces of the city and understand the extent to which they still contain the historical and revolutionary uncertainty.

The Living talks about the Holodomor in Ukraine in 1932-33. One of the protagonists of the story is a British journalist Gareth Jones whose truth about the Ukrainian tragedy was not heard in the West. Embassies from Kharkiv, which was the Ukrainian capital at the time, sent daily reports about the numbers of casualties, about Stalin’s “black boards” to their governments, but the governments kept indifferently stacking papers into archives and ignoring the plight of others. History does not teach anyone anything. And today, it reproduces the same cycle...

All films are available to watch at docuspace.org. 

Photos: Shots from the films Euromaidan: The Rough Cut, People Who Came to Power, Varta1, Lviv, Ukraine, The Living