Director Nowytski reflects on the significance of new documentary (11/09/03)

Director Nowytski reflects on the significance of new documentary

Following are comments on the documentary "Between Hitler and Stalin" by the film's director, Slavko Nowytski. (Edited by Oksana Zakydalsky.)

The main meaning of films for me, as a director and producer, is to see people's reactions to my film, both during the showing and afterwards. Here the reaction was tremendous - people liked the film, things did work out. We tried to explain a difficult subject, and I believe that we succeeded.

There were three major comments made about "Between Hitler and Stalin" after the two Toronto screenings. Everyone agreed that the film is long overdue and that it should be shown everywhere to let people know the truth about what happened in Ukraine during the war. The events of the war in Ukraine have been ignored or bypassed, the facts twisted and, as a result, Ukraine is often presented in a negative light. It is about time that a film came out that explains things clearly and puts to rest the misunderstandings or intentional distortions.

Secondly, many people commented on the fact that the film has a lot of information packed into its 58 minutes. It was gratifying to learn from the younger people - those who knew about the war through their parents' or grandparents' experiences of it yet it didn't mean much to them. After seeing the film, all of a sudden they saw the continuity and context of life at that time and now they are beginning to understand their parents better.

And thirdly, people believe that this film needs to be shown in Ukraine, where people still do not know the whole truth about World War II. Even representatives of the Ukrainian government who were at the screenings [from the Embassy and the Consulate] thought that the film should be shown in Ukraine.

A big challenge for me in making this film was the technical aspect. I had worked with the UCRDC (then the Famine Research Committee) as co-director of "Harvest of Despair," made as a 16 mm motion picture film. "Between Hitler and Stalin" was put together in electronic media. When I made "Harvest," it was my sole full-time occupation, but when I was asked in 1993 to work on this film, I said I would not be able to leave my full-time day job. Thus I worked on this film in my "spare time" - for a long time I didn't have a life. As well, I had to do the editing at a distance as the editor was in Toronto. Furthermore, previously I had only 16 mm and 35 mm film and the photos to deal with; here we had those plus High8, Super8, VHS, Super VHS, DVC, PALSecam from archives in Ukraine - you name it - we had about eight formats that had to be transferred to the digital system we used for editing.

I was responsible for some of the actual footage - interviews in Ukraine and the interview with Norman Davies at Cambridge. I dealt with several crews - Canadian, Ukrainian and UK. Interviews which came from the UCRDC archives had a variant quality and different looks. To bring all this together so that it would not be jarring from one clip to another was quite a trick. As I had edited most of my documentaries, I was able to give explicit instructions on what I expected. It was my job to ensure the editing, as well as choose the music, oversee the narration, choose where the various clips fit, what to do when there were no images - all this was my responsibility because, as the director, I was the one who saw the total picture.

I wanted a known name for the narration and suggested Jack Palance because I love his voice. I always use an actor rather than a narrator because an actor knows how to read, his voice is not monotonous. Fortunately I knew Jack Palance and was able to get him to work on the film. He said it was a good script and, at the end, asked to keep his copy.

This film had many themes. We started out at first to make several shorter films - a series - but, for various reasons, this was abandoned and we had to condense all of the time periods into one and make decisions about what stays in and what is left out in the 58 minutes.

We wanted to show that Ukraine had always sought independence, that Ukraine did not become independent "without shedding a single drop of blood" as some people claim but that many, many people died.

We also wanted to show that Ukraine was not merely a victim but that, in World War II, even though it was caught between the two most brutal regimes in history, was able to assert its aspiration for independence.

Of course, there is always someone who would have done it differently. But this is the film that I did.

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