We at DocNoteFilms have had quite a few plans for the past year.The third season of the TV series about ATO veterans “Krutyy Zamis”, a project about resistance to the “Russian measure” in 2014 in the cities of the east and south, the first game series based on documentary material… We had tickets to Mariupol for the evening of February 24 – we had planned filming. Of course, no one went anywhere.
The co-founders of the studio – director Kostyantyn Klyatskin, cameraman Pavlo Lipa, and producer Serhiy Malyarchuk found themselves in different cities and spent several weeks dealing with pressing issues: family safety, volunteer work, and military assistance. But in a few weeks the question arose: what next?
Detached from our favorite work, we felt somewhat helpless. A documentarian sees stories everywhere, especially when events of a truly global scale are raging around us, so we really wanted to continue filming what we saw around us. However, at the beginning of the war, it was extremely difficult to film anything: a person with a camera was seen as a spy or a saboteur. And even official accreditation from the Ministry of Defense had no authority. After several unsuccessful attempts, we realized that it is necessary to record events, but also to change the usual format somewhat.
We didn’t have any specific plans regarding the format, characters, number of episodes, etc. The main thing was to record a person’s condition, hear his story and thoughts, see changes, compare with his own experience. Therefore, we simply agreed on shooting with the heroes and came to them. The main criteria for the selection of heroes was that a person is professionally engaged in art, stayed in Ukraine and is somewhat known abroad. Subsequently, we invited colleagues from the association Babylon’13 to cooperate. And so they created 25 episodes, each on average 15 minutes long.
Ukrainian artists, as it turned out, joined volunteer movements almost everywhere, even if they evacuated to other cities. Creativity, which for these people is a job, a professional duty and a passion at the same time, helped them to concentrate, to return to their usual life, to rediscover themselves in new circumstances. They could not help creating – just as we could not help filming. And the works of Ukrainian artists, be it posters, paintings, poems or musical compositions, born during the war, supported not only the authors, but also the recipients – we constantly receive feedback about this.
We, DocNoteFilms, managed to implement a large-scale documentary project in this terrible year – to shoot 25 episodes in different cities, from Chernivtsi to Kharkiv, to release it on YouTube Babylon’13 and on Public Television, and most importantly – to once again confirm that culture during war plays an important role. As one of the heroes of the project said – if culture dies, what are we fighting for?
You can watch the series on the Babylon’13 YouTube channel.
