film-maker Iryna Tsilyk captures surreal life in Ukraine

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/oct/01/film-maker-poet-iryna-tsilyk-captures-surreal-life-in-ukraine

‘I want space for jokes’: how film-maker Iryna Tsilyk captures surreal life in Ukraine

Audiences in flak jackets queued to hear the poet and director on a tour of pounded cities. She talks about depicting life during war, from air raid alerts to hesitating between pinot or zinfandel in the supermarket

Charlotte Higgins in Kyiv
Tue 1 Oct 2024 11.36 EDT

Iryna Tsilyk is tired. The Ukrainian poet and film-maker apologises for her English, unnecessarily, and for her patchy cognitive ability, also unnecessarily. The whole of Ukraine, you could say, is tired: tired of the missiles, the deaths, the stress, the grief, and of the guilt that seems to afflict everyone from frontline soldiers to those in safer exile abroad for “not doing enough”. Tsilyk, an author of light-footed, vivid poems and of tender, quietly devastating films, says she has been diagnosed with depression. She shrugs: it’s the same for a bunch of her friends, probably much of the population.

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Her latest film script, she tells me, began as the story of her feelings on one of the terrifying days when Chekh had disappeared into the vortex of the battle for Bakhmut, out of contact, fate unknown. (He is stationed in Kyiv now, away from the combat zone.) In the end, though, she rejected that idea. “I felt that I trapped myself,” she says, “because that day was actually full of stress and pain and nothing else. And I don’t want to make one more film about suffering. I wanted to save some space for jokes, for black humour.”

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Red Zone, the working title of the film, will be an animated documentary. The form will allow her to exit the outer world of realism and explore the sheer surreality of living through war. She is an admirer of Ari Folman’s 2008 film Waltz With Bashir, a pioneering animated documentary that tells a nonfiction story through the memories and dreamscapes of its protagonist.

Tsilyk becomes animated when talking about poetry in Ukraine right now. “Poetry is so cool! The other arts, they are not as powerful by far!” She is thinking of its huge popularity in Ukraine now, and how it is perhaps the form that can best capture the fracturing of meaning, even the explosion of language, that the war has brought about.

And it brings people together. Last year she and other Ukrainian poets went on tour to give readings in Odesa, Mykolaiv, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia and Kharkiv – cities that were, and are, being daily pounded by Russian missiles. In Zaporizhzhia, the venue had a capacity of 300 but 700 squeezed in. In Mykolaiv, 400 came in the middle of the working day and listened to poems for three hours. Watching people take off flak jackets before listening to poems was profoundly moving, she says. You could think of it as a metaphor: you remove your hard shell and make yourself porous to the art.

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