16th Odesa International Film Festival

FIPRESCI Celebrates 100th Anniversary: 

Round table “100 Years of Film Criticism in Times of War: A Ukrainian Perspective”

Moderator:
Alik Shpyliuk – Member of the Council on State Film Fund, Program Consultant of the Odesa International Film Festival, National Coordinator of FIPRESCI

Participants:

• Serhiy Trymbach – film critic, film scholar, screenwriter, public figure, member of the NSCU, SKU, FIPRESCI, Ukrainian Film Academy

• Anna Machukh – Executive Director of the Odesa International Film Festival

• Maryna Braterska-Dron – Head and Professor of the Department of Film Studies at the Kyiv National University of Theatre, Cinema and Television named after I. K. Karpenko-Kary, Doctor of Philosophy

• Oksana Volosheniuk – Chair of the Board of the Union of Film Critics of Ukraine, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Film Studies

• Volodymyr Voitenko – Editor-in-Chief of the journal KINO-KOLO, founder of SKU, member of NSCU, Ukrainian Film Academy

• Ihor Kromf – film critic, member of SKU, FIPRESCI

• Oleksandr Husiev – film critic, Deputy Chair of the Board of the Union of Film Critics of Ukraine, member of NSCU, FIPRESCI, Ukrainian Film Academy

• Yaroslav Pidgora-Hviazdovskyi – film critic, member of NSCU, SKU, Ukrainian Film Academy, veteran, reserve captain of the Armed Forces of Ukraine

• Oleh Chornyi – film critic, member of NSCU, SKU, Ukrainian Film Academy

Serhiy Trymbach: Ukrainian Film Criticism: One Hundred Years of Solitary Reflections, or To Give Birth to One’s Own Cinema and Die

“In 1925, the magazine Kino was born, marking the beginning of national film criticism, which also defined the very phenomenon of Ukrainian film culture. It also presented films as part of the cultural canon: it was then that the name of Oleksandr Dovzhenko was affirmed as a ‘living classic.’
The magazine died an unnatural death in the famine year of 1933. The history of national film criticism has short, sporadic periods of existence—struggles for Ukrainian cinema as a stable phenomenon of national culture. It is a history of names and institutions, which still looks very dramatic today.”

Volodymyr Voitenko

“Cinema is the most accessible and popular art form in all its types and genres. In recent decades, thanks to online social networks, every viewer has become a public film critic—of course, on their own cultural level. Many film producers and filmmakers believe that so-called film critics exist only to promote them—saying, why else are they in the world?!
Ancient wisdom holds: screenwriters, directors, cinematographers, actors create films, while film scholars and critics create cinema. Still.”

Oksana Volosheniuk

“Film criticism during the Second World War. Change, but not substitution, of institutions.”

Oleksandr Husiev

“Ukrainian film critics, like all our compatriots, after the beginning of the full-scale war had to rethink their work and way of life. Should the muses of film criticism fall silent amid the roar of cannons?
Those of our colleagues who did not take up arms or change professions justify in different ways the value of their work during wartime and try to answer the eternal questions of film criticism—which are especially sharp in days of war—about the balance between the national and the universal, between aesthetic values and moral message, between depicting grim reality and affirming the desired ideal.”

Ihor Kromf

“How criticism preserves the memory of national processes in cinema. How criticism becomes a medium of preserving the memory of the processes of development and formation of national cinema, and how the critical process itself becomes a form of memory practice.”

Yaroslav Pidgora-Hviazdovskyi

“Film criticism during war. Importance, involvement, questions.”

Oleh Chornyi

“Aberrations of memory about Ukrainian cinema in contemporary digital media and social networks.”