“Live” – a film about Holodomor by Sergey Bukovsky

The filming of the “Live” by Sergey Bukovsky has come to an end recently. The “Live” is a feature-length documentary that continues a theme of Holodomor in Ukraine. Sergey Bukovsky is known as a director of the “Spell Your Name” documentary, produced in 2007 in a collaboration between the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education, the Victor Pinchuk Foundation and Steven Spielberg. The premiere of the picture is planned specially for the Day of Memory in Ukraine. The basic core of a film “Live” are events of Holodomor in 1932-1933, however subject and thematic lines last since 1917 and prior to the beginning of the Second World War. Such chronology is chosen to show preconditions of Holodomor.

The picture is called “Live” because it tells about the live people who survived the tragedy. But the story is about dead also, about whom we revive memory, and which remain for us live while we remember them. For Bukovsky it is a last film of historical documentary. The first was «War. The Ukrainian account», the second was «Spell Your Name», and now “Live”.

Wide archival sources were used for the production. There were both film archives and archives of documents – the Red Cross, the state archives of Italy, Poland, and also private ones. Testimonies which aren’t included into the film, will be transferred to the International fund «Ukraine 3000». The part of shootings passed in Wales with the cooperation of the family of reknowned British journalist Gareth Johnes. Gareth Johnes was the first journalist who told the truth about Holocaust in Ukraine. In March, 1933, after returning from Soviet Union, he had published the press -elease in Berlin in which for the first time had made known the facts of artificial hunger in Ukraine. As reaction to his article the journalist was declared the enemy of Soviet Union, the persona non grata, and was accused of distribution of the false information. In 1935 Garet Johns was killed. Director’s group had possibility to get acquainted with all documents of the journalist, with his private correspondence.

The premiere of the film in Ukraine is preliminary scheduled for November. After that film producer Mark Edwards is planning to present the picture in Europe.