A conversation with Kseniia Opria, Razom ArtsLink Fellow

“Deconstructions: Right to the Truth” draws on archival films from the late Soviet period and the 1990s. What made this the right moment to bring them back?
Since 2022, Ukrainians have become much more attentive to their history and cultural heritage, as the full-scale war has made us feel their value and the risk of losing them. Ukrainian state archives hold hundreds of forgotten films that still have enormous potential.

This is why the title of the program, Deconstructions, speaks both to the films’ themes, which are connected to decolonization, and to the recovering the names and legacies of brave and talented filmmakers. As a generation born in the 2000s, we didn’t know about many of them, but we are finally beginning to rediscover these treasures, piece by piece, on dusty archive shelves.

How does the program encourage viewers to read these films through a decolonial lens?
We have to acknowledge that Ukraine was a former colony of Russia, and we still feel the consequences of that colonial past today. During the Soviet period, the events referenced in these films took place: Chornobyl, the war in Afghanistan, the repression of artists, and mass deportations. These are deeply painful events, but as subjects of our own history, we have to take responsibility for confronting them and deconstructing the perspective that, for decades, described as “tragedies” what was, in fact, a “crime.”

What thread links these five stories together, and how did you shape the order and pairing of the screenings?
“Chornobyl became a catalyst for a public dialogue that no longer wanted to hide the sharp edges,” as one of my sociology professors, Volodymyr Shelukhin, put it so aptly at a Docudays UA discussion this summer.

These films were made from the late 1980s through the mid-1990s, and they existed within the same historical landscape. The first film, Sunday Morning, is about everyday life and the reality that existed at the time. The films that follow, arranged in almost chronological order, reconstruct that reality through a series of key historical events. 

These films were digitized exclusively for this series. What was the process like?
The films were digitized from 35mm positive film using a Blackmagic Cintel Scanner exclusively for the Docudays UA festival, which took place in Kyiv this summer. This was made possible thanks to the collaboration of my colleagues Yuliia Kovalenko – who, by the way, will take part in the Q&A after the screening at DCTV – the curator of the full Deconstructions program and the Program Director of Docudays UA. And Alona Penzіi, the head of the Dovzhenko Centre, one of Ukraine’s largest film archives, and the curator of this particular Ukrainian selection of films, which I will have the honor of presenting for the first time in the United States.

What does it mean to present this in the current US context?
These are films that the Soviet authorities would never have wanted American audiences to see, because they reveal the vulnerability of that state. Fortunately, we are no longer living in the Soviet Union or in the era of the Cold War, so we can be honest and find points of connection through which we can reflect on collective trauma and think about how to prevent the mistakes of the past from being repeated.