Filming of Ira Tsylyk’s new short film “Home” recently completed. The plot of this cold, somewhat mystical film takes place in the 40s in Galicia and talks about people whose lives were radically changed by circumstances.
The main roles in the film were played by Ekaterina Molchanova (“My Mermaid, My Lorelei”) and Dmitry Yaroshenko (“Ukrainian Lessons”).
Ira Tsylyk talks about how this film resonates with Oksana Zabuzhko’s “Museum of Abandoned Secrets,” how it was to work with Taras Prokhasko as an actor, and how the cinematic is intertwined with the literary.
What will your new film be about?
I prepared myself for this difficult question – “what is your film about?” – and somehow scribbled out a poem-answer:
There are two axles. So tired, weary of children, hung.
In front of them is a white nothing with a thin stitch-like stitch.
And she steps, and she covers herself in the wake of her larger ones.
so, as it seemed, in this field Ishov was alone.
So, otherwise there would be no one. The snow began to wheeze,
All life has passed, all the insecurity has been forgotten.
And she thinks: why don’t I remember our nickname?
And I think: at what point will I be caught breaking the check.
We forgot the freshness of the crisp whiteness, beat the anniversary, drank beard
on the table, peace in the day, the smell of coffee, days of ugly
So, there was nothing and there was nothing, so, otherwise, everything would be empty.
Take my shorn head into my bed. I am your home.
I am your temple, your simple present hour, the home of your mindlessness,
your lighthouse, your star, your stronghold of salty shores.
And there, and there, and he notices their traces, having seen the surface,
There’s no way back. And there’s no way forward, really.
…but seriously, I changed my mind several times about what my film “Home” is about. On the surface there is a quiet, cold, somewhat mystical story about two people who were forced by repression and the close presence of enemies to abandon their usual life, from home, but at the same time still keep this home within themselves.
The plot of the film takes the viewer to the second half of the 1940s…
Yes, the events take place in Galicia, but this is not a film about UPA rebels and, especially, not “about Bandera” (I heard this interpretation several times), not about heroes, but only about people whose world was irreversibly changed by circumstances.
Although, I must admit, at one time I was inspired to make some decisions by the storyline of Oksana Zabuzhko’s novel “The Museum of Abandoned Secrets” about a delicate young lady who, like many women of that time, became a member of the UPA underground, hid in forest shelters along with other rebels and she herself could not remember whether she had that other life – with linen tablecloths, lace collars, the ticking of clocks in the ringing rooms of her large city apartment?
However, I tried to film this short film in such a way as to leave room for a certain universality of the story, since at all times, in most peoples of the world, someone had to protect their home from strangers. It sounds somewhat pathetic, although we tried to avoid pathos as much as possible during the filming process.
When was the idea for your new film born?
I wrote this script in the fall of 2013, that is, even before the Maidan. And I got the opportunity to realize it already when, it seems, I internally lived several new lives. To be honest, at some point I tried to abandon this project… A difficult topic, a slippery slope now. However, I hesitated for several months and came to terms with myself. Quite the contrary – living day after day all these repetitions of repetitions, I found in myself a new optics for looking at the material.
If you think about it this way, my “birth traumas” are also with me, and I’ve been thinking a lot lately, say, about my great-great-grandmother and great-great-grandfather. They, with their Polish surname and rich estate in the Zhitomir region, were “dispossessed” at one time, but their great-great-grandmother somehow managed to escape from the prison camp to Solovki, but her husband did not. She lived a long life and never saw him again… In the end, every family is full of its own “Museum of Abandoned Secrets.”
How did the idea come about to invite Taras Prokhasko to the film? Previously, he had only appeared in two short films by Moch, “The Flowers of St. Francis” and “Flight into Egypt.”
When I tried to explain to the casting director what kind of church caretaker we needed in one of the episodes, I constantly used Taras Prokhasko as an example as a kind of reference. “I need a hero who glows from within.” And so I looked, looked at photographs of the actors, and then suddenly I thought – wait, can’t I photograph Taras himself?
In fact, typically accurate non-professional actors sometimes bring such a special organic quality to the frame that you would never intentionally blind them. As a result, it was very interesting for me to work with Taras, I hope he got something for himself on our set.
You played one of the roles in the film “My Grandmother Fanny Kaplan” by Alena Demyanenko. This film brought together many, many Ukrainian directors as actors. What was it like to work in such a company?
And this is in continuation of the conversation about
non-professional film actors. It seems to me that it was a rather interesting and successful idea to invite various female directors to play cameo roles as political prisoners in hard labor. After all, the director, whatever one may say, is a person with a difficult character, and this can be felt in the frame.
They also brought together such bright girls, wow… It was fun to vegetate together in prison, steam in a bathhouse, beat a soldier, defending our friend, and “freeze” in a casing and felt boots, depicting the fierce Siberian winter in Kiev +25.
Both in “My Grandmother Fanny Kaplan” and in your new film “Home” the main role was played by Ekaterina Molchanova. How was it working with her?
I noticed Katka with her amazing texture a long time ago, and on the set of my colleagues I finally became convinced of my desire to shoot this particular actress. And her husband in our film was played by Dmitry Yaroshenko. This couple turned out, in my opinion, beautiful and piercing. Working with the two of them is a pleasure. Persistent, professional, very talented. And, to be honest, when collaborating with actors, I always look for a style of acting that is devoid of characteristic expressiveness, that is, one that is guided by the principle “little is really a lot.”
It seems to me that cinema and literature coexist harmoniously in your work. What is it really like? Do writing and cinematography complement each other, or are they in conflict?
I already somehow live with them – we quarrel, we make peace. It happens differently. Sometimes literary projects come to the fore, and cinema is on pause. Sometimes it’s the other way around. One way or another, I think that for a long time now there has been talk about the obvious symbiosis of these two types of my activities.
Let’s say, I have repeatedly heard the opinions of critics, my prose is cinematic. Perhaps I really almost always see what I write about. Unfortunately, according to the current rules of the game, it is not possible to shoot movies often (you must admit that film directors, unlike their colleagues – cameramen, sound engineers, artists, etc., have almost the least amount of practice), but a laptop is always nearby , you can use it to create your own “cinema without film” at any time…