Rodnyansky contemplates key events in Ukraine’s history and how they have affected him and his family; including the referendum on Ukraine’s independence, the mass execution of Jews at Babyn Yar, and the Soviet authorities’ attempt to erase the memory of this tragedy, Chernobyl, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Germany, and, of course, the war—the full-scale invasion by the Russian army, which began on February 24, 2022.
Alexander Rodnyansky, Andriy Alferov
Alexander Rodnyansky was born in Kyiv, and began his career as a documentary filmmaker, with films like ‘Tired Cities’ (1988), ‘Farewell, USSR’ (1991) or ‘Farewell, USSR 2’ (1994), that won prestigious international awards. As a producer, he has been nominated to the Academy Award for ‘Leviathan’ (2014) and ‘Loveless’ (2017), both directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev. He also worked with directors as Kantemir Balagov, Régis Wargnier, Billy Bob Thornton, the Wachowski siblings, Tom Tykver, Robert Rodriguez, Ari Folman or Kornel Mundruzo, in films than have premiered and won prizes at the Cannes, Berlin, Venice and Toronto International Film Festivals. Andriy Alferov is a Ukrainian director, producer, and film historian. He has curated two multi-media exhibitions on cinema (‘Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors’, 2016, and ‘Flights in Dreams and in Reality’, 2020), in 2024 codirected with Stanislaw Gurenko ‘Dissident’ and is the author of several books on Sergei Parajanov’s cinema and Soviet Ukrainian urban cinema.
