We are witnessing history in the making. As we screen films that show what has already happened, we remain mindful that other events are taking place right now. The filmmakers whose work is presented within the program entitled “The Context of Truth”, began instinctively recording what they saw and came to realize that they were capturing something that—most probably—will be gone forever. They are not just recording the war, but keeping alive the memory of what has been lost: places, people, normality. Even during the war, people in Ukraine are dining in restaurants, getting haircuts, dancing, and watching films. But when they leave the dark cinema hall, they return to a life full of almost the same images that they just saw on the screen.
Katherine Younger, a Permanent Fellow at the IWM, and Kseniya Kharchenko, Documenting Ukraine Project Manager, in a conversation on the careful choice of messages about the careless reality of war.
Kseniya: The Documenting Ukraine research program, launched in March 2022 at Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (IWM) in Vienna, goes far beyond its usual academic activities. It is eclectic and versatile project that supports scholars, journalists, public intellectuals, artists, and archivists, aimed at creating a chronicle of the Russo-Ukrainian War and, at the same time, strengthening Ukrainian agency by letting Ukrainians be heard and seen. For instance, in cooperation with this human world we arrange special program "The Context of Truth" including film screenings and discussion “Documentaries as a Fragile Shelter for Truth, Responsibility and Impact”. It entails tailoring messages to different audiences, which is a demanding and at times draining task. As a co-founder of this program, together with Timothy Snyder, and as a person talking to Ukrainians as a foreigner, how do you talk to foreigners about Ukrainians?
Katherine: Modulating how you talk about the war to fit the audience is important; at the same time, by doing so, you're giving them some emotional distance from it. One way to get past that distance is to combine discursive elements with other ways of telling stories. For example, stating that Mariupol is 90% destroyed is one thing. But it is another thing entirely to invite people to watch two guys [Mstyslav Chernov, director of “20 Days in Mariupol,” and fellow photographer Evgeniy Maloletka] live through it. That grabs people in a very different way.
Kseniya: The main challenge for Ukrainians is to walk on the thin ice of the balanced truth: neither to fall into victimhood and watch people’s sympathies turn into repulsion, nor to present the image of an immortal hero, an invincible “brave Ukrainian” who is free of trauma and doesn’t need support.
Katherine: This war is in many ways black and white: there is an aggressor and there is a country that has been attacked and must defend itself. The temptation then is to treat everything that way, which renders people as either invincible heroes or victims. So, when we broaden the types of stories being told, it can bring nuance and grey areas in a way that still preserves the overall moral clarity of the war.
Kseniya: When I was watching “20 Days in Mariupol” late one night, I kept reaching over to touch my sleeping son. I know what Chernov, as the film's narrator, meant when he asked, “What if I will never see my daughters again?” It instinctively gets at something deep inside every parent, regardless of who you are and where you come from.
Katherine: Absolutely. I think one way to think about the stories of this war is to try to find the specific points of commonality, whether food security, whether the kidnapping of children, or any of the other things that societies around the world have had to grapple with, and that provokes this intense resonance with the Ukrainian experience. I can't count how many academics I've talked to who have teared up when I mention colleagues whose personal libraries were destroyed. And these are these things that feel incredibly comprehensible.
But I also think it works on a bigger scale than these individual stories. We are constantly confronted with the challenge of getting the world to see the truth and recognize it. One thing that brings together the films we are including in this program is that they all work deeply in explicit and implicit ways with the notion of combating the undermining of the truth and take agency by saying, ‘Here’s what actually happened.”
Kseniya: Now we see the ways that this reclaiming of agency and truth-telling is happening even with regards to events from the past: it took nearly 90 years for the Holodomor of 1932–1933, a man-made famine that killed millions of Ukrainians, to be recognized by many governments around the world as a genocide. After that, I think everybody in this annihilation Russo-Ukrainian War is afraid of losing themselves for good.
Katherine: Ukrainians are fully aware of the echoes of the past. Think of the Executed Renaissance, the cultural generation of the 1930s that the Soviet regime was able to wipe out. That’s one of the reasons we need to ensure that today's stories don’t vanish. It’s so painful to think about all the books, art, ideas that won't be brought into the world because lives have been cut short.
Kseniya: This work requires total commitment. It touches you; it inspires you; it hurts you. What is it for you?
Katherine: I have the incredible privilege of having had Ukrainian writers, cultural figures, and academics make me who I am today, of learning so much from them over many years. And one of the things that I want now more than anything is to give that privilege to other people. Not only people around the world now, but also future generations. And the other thing that motivates me is the depth of insight coming from the people who are building Documenting Ukraine with us and how they are bringing together present, past, and future in this remarkable, genre-spanning way. What about you?
Kseniya: I left Kyiv on 25 February 2022 with my son. I think of this project as a link not with the past but instead with the present and future. Metaphorically speaking, I live in an ideal Ukraine where I also have all these remarkable people who made me who I am, and I am now in a position to contribute to Ukraine becoming what we are struggling for.
I look forward to watching Alisa Kovalenko’s documentary “We Will Not Fade Away” on the big screen. This is a story of teenagers from Donbas who fulfill their dreams and therefore give hope that such things are possible if you make an effort. This is also a story of grief, because even enormous efforts may not be enough to change things, but we won’t give up and fade away.
