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6 No.36 JUNE 12, 2018 CLOSE UP WWW.DAY.KIEV.UA The ideal FIFA World Cup, to kick off in Russia on June 14, should look as follows: a boycott on the part of world leaders and ordinary soccer fans and the release of about 70 Ukrainian political prisoners. The example is being set by members of the British royal family and British ministers who will not go to see the tournament because of Russia’s likely complicity in poisoning exintelligence officer Sergei Skripal. For the same reason, Iceland announced boycotting the World Cup. At the same time, 5,000 Ukrainians are going to the country that annexed Crimea and unleashed a war in the Donbas, enslaves and tortures thousands of their compatriots. To bring the world to its senses at least a little, artist Andrii Yermolenko has drawn a series of posters about the world soccer championship. Instead of idyllic pictures, we can see the military in the goal, bombings, and a downed airplane against the suffocating red background. Andrii can be said to have struck a chord – his drawings went viral in the internet, and Facebook even blocked him. Andrii YER- MOLENKO told The Day why, in spite of a wide response, he considers this a “one-man picket.” ● “I APPEAL MORE TO ENGLISH-SPEAKING EUROPEANS” “You see, very many serious things have occurred in the past month. Firstly, it is the hunger strike of Sentsov and Kolchenko. This is one of the factors that catalyzed the creation of these posters,” Yermolenko begins the conversation. “At first I joined the campaign of drawing posters in support of Sentsov. When you look at the Ukrainian information “In order to bring the world to its senses…” field, you can see that our Ministry of Information Politics is falling short of its targets. This kind of posters about the FIFA World Cup in Russia should have appeared long ago. I understood there would be none of them until the championship opening. And then we would be lifting our hands in dismay and saying that all those Europeans, Germans, or whoever it is, are bastards because they went to the championship instead of boycotting it. But all is very simple – nobody shaped a right information policy in Ukraine about this championship. And this was my small one-man picket against the tournament. I wanted more people to pay attention to this. I appeal more to English-speaking Europeans rather than to Ukrainians. “To tell the truth, it is terrible that things have very noticeably changed for the worse in comparison with the 1980 Olympics in the Soviet Union, when a lot of countries boycotted it. Now, owing to various commercial and business interests, everybody is shutting their eyes to such obvious things as the war Artist Andrii Yermolenko drew a series of placards on the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia and explained why it must be boycotted in Ukraine and Syria, acts of terror in London with a Russian trace, Russia’s interference into elections in a number of countries. The impression is that when civilized people – you know, all wearing neckties – are sitting at the table, and a barefaced ruffian suddenly climbs up and dirties the table, they are all saying to him: ‘Tut-tut, you shouldn’t do so, we are warning you for the last time.’ Then this ruffian says: ‘And now let’s go to my home place and hold a cool soccer championship.’ And they say: ‘Let’s go. Maybe, this will salvage him. Maybe, he will become better if we come.’ He won’t – that’s the point. This silence prompts him to go on behaving brazenly and disgustingly.” ● “SUCH SIMPLE THINGS AS PROBITY AND THE FEELING OF DIGNITY GO AWRY” At the same time, 5,000 Ukrainians have bought tickets to the World Cup. “It is a shock to me. I know that very many Ukrainians are saying it is not their war. This disgusts me. In the first days of the war, very may soccer fans joined the army. They took up arms for our Ukraine, while very many Ukrainians ‘in the chips’ bought tickets (which cost a pretty penny) and are traveling to the aggressor country that is killing your country. They are traveling there to watch this championship. In addition, I am sure that, what is still more disgusting, they will be saying to Russians: ‘It’s not our or your fault, it is politics. We know that you are good and Ukrainians are not fighting against Russians. It’s politicians…’ This is also a catalyst of my posters. “Some people are doing something, but… My posters are really a one-man picket against all this. Such simple things as probity and the feeling of dignity – your own and of your country – go awry. They are trampled upon and killed day after day. I am sure still more of the Ukrainian establishment and politicians will push forward to this championship, which infuriates me still more. “We are living at a moment when things regain their proper places. Black is black, and white is white. We must not be afraid to call things by their proper names.” ● “WE HAVE A BOYCOTTED BOYCOTT” Did Facebook block you over the posters? “It not only blocked me. Before that, I began to receive on Facebook various messages from the unknown people with all kinds of embeddings. I knew that those were viruses and did not accept them. The next day Facebook blocked me. I asked some people to hand out the posters, for I’d like as many people as possible to understand that it is a blood-stained soccer. I was unblocked, but not on the account, where I posted these posters, then they began to add some unclear files. I cleaned up my page the other day. “To block means to be afraid. I was prepared for this and opened one more account to post messages from there in case they don’t unblock me. “We are living in an era of information warfare, when participants are still to lean how to handle it. I can’t say we are losing. We are not losing. We just don’t know so far how to wage this war. I’d like more people, who know how to do this, to get engaged in this war. I am one of these fighters. I know there are very many fighters of this kind. The state is not exactly paying attention to us, but that’s all right – we must do our job.” How do the foreigners you address by way of posters react to them? “It is some French and Belgian publishers and a Dane who asked me permission to use these posters. I also commented for Radio Liberty in the Czech Republic. A lot of people have been turning to me. The British asked to write about this. I allow using and spreading these posters free of charge. “We have a boycotted boycott. We, Ukrainians and Europe as a whole are boycotting the boycott that was to have taken place. Schizophrenia pure and simple. I’d like to draw your attention to this not because I am so good and polite. I am just scared. At this very moment, some of my friends are fighting at the front, and other friends have died. I know that I must also do something. Oleh Sentsov is on a hunger strike in the country which hosts this championship and to which politicians from various countries will travel. They will travel to celebrate the ‘feast of soccer,’ while very many Ukrainian political prisoners are simply dying there. And should anything happen to Sentsov (I hope he will be freed anyway) or any other political prisoner, the concerned Europe will say: ‘Tuttut, how vexing and bad!’ It’s the most terrible thing, double standards, when a rapist is told not to rape, but he goes on doing so, the same people who say ‘don’t rape’ visit his home to drink tea or cognac and talk about soccer. In my view, it is the same thing.” By Maria PROKOPENKO, The Day
WWW.DAY.KIEV.UA CULT URE No.36 JUNE 12, 2018 7 By Dmytro DESIATERYK, The Day The drama Touch Me Not (Nu Ma Atinge- Ma, Romania – Germany – Czech Republic – Bulgaria – France, 2018) became a real sensation of the last Berlinale, winning there both the Golden Bear for the best feature film and the award for the best debut. This work, done as a peculiar combination of live-action and documentary cinema, tells the story of three heroes – Laura, Tudor, and Christian. The first two are played by well-known actors Laura Benson (Dangerous Liaisons (1988), Ready to Wear (1994)) and Tomas Lemarquis (3 Days to Kill (2014), X Men: Apocalypse (2016), Blade Runner 2049 (2017)). Like many supporting characters, they share the same problem as they strive and at the same time acutely fear intimacy, corporeal and emotional alike. Christian practically plays himself: crippled by spinal muscular atrophy, he is completely free from prejudice and lives with the girl he loves. The film itself is a kind of story about liberation, about overcoming of protective mechanisms and taboos, sometimes in quite unusual ways. In the non-competitive program of the Molodist Festival, which ended in Kyiv on June 3, Touch Me Not was personally presented by the film’s director Adina Pintilie and the leading actress Laura Benson. Adina-Elena Pintilie was born in Bucharest on January 12, 1980. She debuted in 2003 as a documentary filmmaker. Her non-live-action works participated in the competition programs of the festivals in Locarno, Rotterdam, Leipzig, and Warsaw. Pintilie serves as artistic director and curator of the International Experimental Film Festival in Bucharest. Touch Me Not is her first live-action film. After the Kyiv premiere, Pintilie answered questions of The Day’s correspondent. How did it occur to you to make Touch Me Not? “When I was twenty, I thought I knew everything about how relationship should function, intimacy, our desire mechanism, and also what means beauty. But in the past years of life, I realized that actually I don’t know anything. Once clear ideas get destabilized when I enter in contact with real people and with real life. So, we set out on this journey to just question our own preconceived ideas about how intimacy functions, and to discover how people actually can access intimacy in the most unexpected ways. And back in 2013, we started an extensive casting process, which was more like in documentaries, but this film is not a documentary. We try to avoid all these labels, because the film is mainly a research one, it is a process film, a research film. “So, in 2013 we started this extending casting period. It was not like looking for actors, it was more like looking for like-minded people. And after finding them, we worked with video diaries, with a lot of filmed exercises – it was before the official shooting, where we could get accustomed with the camera being, like, a witness of some of our very personal, intimate stories. So, this kind of a long process helped to grow the trust between the participants in the project.” It looks like creating a commune of sorts. “It was like fiction functioning like more a sort of laboratory, like a safe place which allowed us to explore really sensitive areas. Because when you are protecting yourself under, let’s say, fictional character, in that convention you can go everywhere, because you don’t need to know what is real, what is invented, what is imagined, what is memory. Many of them came as themselves in the film. So, they were not playing with this mixture of fictional and real elements, they brought their own.” Did you have the help of professional psychologists? “Yes. For example, the emotional anatomy workshop: it’s designed by this very distinguished German performance artist and therapist Julia Sparmann. I found this very inspiring. So I proposed to collaborate and to create a workshop for the film, and within this structure, reenactment of the real workshop, we cast real people that wanted to work with this intimacy area in front of the camera, to share their experiences. And they were already entering this, I would call it, conventional laboratory. And everything that happens in this created structure, or a lot of what is happening there, it’s really authentic encounters between people. So, this is a very good example of how the mixture between staging and reality functions.” THE DRAMA TOUCH ME NOT BECAME A REAL SENSATION OF THE LAST BERLINALE REUTERS photo “We set out on this journey to just questionourownpreconceivedideas” Can your directorial approach be called anthropological? “I would not call it, because anthropologizing claims sort of objectivity. But this film is a very subjective emotional exploration that each of us went through. And by being highly subjective, I don’t think you can call it a scientific approach. I mean, in the end, if you look at psychotherapy, it is both sort of science, but it also involves high doses of subjectivity, intuition, and non-rational thinking, because they work a lot with the unconscious mind, with early memories, with a lot of emotions. So, that’s why I’m hesitating to put it in the area of science, but I would put it in the area of research. Research about human nature, in that sense it is connected to anthropology.” One of the protagonists is played by an actor with a disability. What was special about working with such an actor? The Golden Bear winner of the Berlin Film Festival Adina Pintilie discusses the intimacy and phenomenon of the Romanian cinema “For me it was very important in the casting process. And when trying to find these people, it was very important to feel that they have a strong motivation, emotional motivation to be part of the project. And Christian, it’s a very particular example of this, because he wanted to communicate with the audience. And actually, I think this film functioned like sort of a dialog, like many of the characters have their own, very specific views of the world, very progressive, and they would like to share it with the audience. And Christian said it from the beginning: ‘I’m not afraid that this film is going to be attacked for me, for doing it. Because you know, the people who are going to attack the film are people who just actually have no idea about disability and about the relationship between disability and intimacy. They think that we, people who have different label on body, we just need to be taken care of, we are asexual, we don’t have any intimate life.’ And for him it was very important to enter into this communication with the audience and to share with them that people with the different label on bodies have the same desire, the same needs, and the same right to exist as sexual beings as any other person. He is also an activist for the rights of people with disabilities. And it was really an inspiring experience for all of us in the film to have Christian and Grit. They are a real couple, they are really passionate explorers of intimacy. Earlier only Christian was able to verbalize, to speak about this, but now Grit started to explain, and her voice is growing in this whole thing.” Do you see a difference between documentary and live-action cinema? “The border between the two is actually so fluid, because in the end, it’s about cinema, which is a very subjective experience of reality. It’s an illusion that you can capture the reality in a sort of an objective way. You cannot do something like that from the moment you choose to put the camera and to make a frame, and everything becomes a matter of subjective perception. I had the privilege to witness a master class that Werner Herzog [a German screenwriter, film director, author, actor, and opera director. – Author] gave some years ago in Salonica, and he was criticizing, debating with this view of documentary as being sort of fly-on-thewall approach, where you don’t interfere, you don’t alter reality. And he was saying, ‘I don’t want to be a fly on the wall, I want to be the bee that stings.’ Because you can’t have access to the truth of the human being by just putting the camera and watching that thing, that is happening in front of you. I have to be able to create situation, to provoke, to create the environment that can bring that truth to the surface. So, the reality is not what it is, it’s transformed by the subjective perception. And in that sense, I really don’t think there’s a distinction.” Now, when there are many different kinds of technologies that let one change one’s body, what do you think, how has the attitude to corporeality changed? “I basically can talk about my very subjective experience. I notice that in the past years at least, there is a strong interest for these selfexploration activities, like for workshops in different areas. And I think this happens everywhere in the world. Everywhere I traveled, there is growing interest in this process of getting to know your own body, and to be friends and accepting your body as it is. But luckily, more and more people start to look at that as something very normal, as something which is naturally part of your life and is worth exploring, because it helps you. If you know yourself better, you can solve also the other stuff. Actually, psychoanalysts have for a hundred years talked about how intimacy and sexuality are such natural parts of your life and your development. This all is so natural in psychotherapy, but for many other areas of discussion in our life, this is a difficult topic to approach. Psychoanalyst Michael Bader was explaining that your sexual behavior and your sexual fantasy can be key to read aspects of yourself also in other domains. So, you can judge yourself and say, ‘I’m wrong, I’m sick, I have to go to hospital to repair myself’ – or you can look with honesty at yourself and you say, ‘OK, I am like this, let’s try to understand what’s behind this behavior, why I am actually doing that.” There are ways of experiencing intimacy different from the norm, if you try to understand them and not put a label that they are wrong, first of all, you will have a better understanding of yourself, and then you will have a different relationship with the other person in front of you. So, you will not so easy become an extremist, or judgmental, or right-wing, the degree of aggressiveness has high chances to decrease. That’s why a film like this is important, because it’s offering a sort of mirror about how people can be different than what you think they are, how you think they should be.” In conclusion, a question asked from our Ukrainian perspective this time. It can be said that we here in Ukraine envy you, Romanian filmmakers, greatly, because you have just suddenly, after a prolonged period of communism and troubles, created an incredibly flourishing cinematic school. How have you managed to do it? “I don’t know. “I don’t know. I mean, the Romanian cinematic community was all the time clashing with political system, with the state system. So, you have this situation which is not so nice and cozy, it’s not so comfortable, so then you need to put extra energy to make things happen. Maybe this is energy which comes from having an enemy, having an antagonist. There are a lot of talented people, but not all of them functioning.”
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