An excellent documentary on Ukrainian streaming rental service Takflix: The Babushkas of Chornobyl.
The documentary explores the story of a group of old ladies (the titular 'babushkas' - aka 'grannies'). Living in the exclusion zone until the reactor meltdown, they evacuated along with everyone they knew. But, later in life, growing tired of living away from their homes, returned to the zone.
This is a really remarkable story - the women are interesting, compelling characters who you just feel a great affection towards, and seeing how they lived in the zone is fascinating.
The film was made before the invasion, before the occupation of Chornobyl. I sometimes wonder what became of these ladies - are they still alive? Were they still there when the russians arrived? What happened to them?
Really worth watching if you've got any interest in Chornobyl, the zone, or rural Ukrainian life.
The rental costs 95 Ukrainian hryvnias, or around £2, for a 70 minute film; besides some minor difficulties getting my card to transact overseas, I had zero problems using this service, and intend to rent from them again - they have a number of classic and modern Ukrainian films available, and a dedicated section for those with English subtitles.
Ukrainian Film Festival 2023 Side by Side Side by Side, Ukrainian Institute London’s fourth annual Ukrainian Film Festival will present 5 screenings of feature, documentary, and short films, with each film providing a window into life in contemporary Ukraine, the astonishing resilience of its people...
This weekend in London there will be the Ukrainian Film Festival 2023: Side by Side, the fourth annual such festival.
Running from Thursday to Sunday, there will be five different films on show, on the themes of humanity, compassion, strength and love.
More details and tickets from the Ukrainian Institute London:
https://ukrainianinstitute.org.uk/ukrainian-film-festival-2023side-by-side
And a trailer showcasing the films on their Youtube channel:
https://youtu.be/Kxq9yGAzEv8
#Ukraine #London #Cinema #Film #Movies #WhatsOn #WhatsOnLondon
Sorry this got posted multiple times. It wasn't working properly, so I deleted and re-posted. But then it got boosted to the rest of fedi after I'd deleted. I think the server was having some intermittent issues. So those posts links don't work 😬
I posted this over on Mastodon at the weekend, but it seems like a good thing to promote on this group too (apologies that my text is pretty much copy paste from my Mastodon post).
This Kickstarter for a Ukrainian science fiction anthology looks great.
They already secured a grant form the Ukrainian Book Institute for many stories from Ukrainian authors (and translations into English), and have passed the funding goal for printing (plus the first two stretch goals!).
Backing starts from as little as $1 for the ebook (or $20 plus international postage for a print copy).
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/atthisarts/embroidered-worlds
The usual caveats apply to risk on Kickstarter projects of course - no guarantees that any project will succeed. However, this one is from an established indie publisher with a track record of delivering on multiple Kickstarters, so it seems reasonably solid.
Personally, I’d love to see it hit the $30k stretch goal to get some illustrations, that sounds very cool.
The publishers are on Mastodon too, which is always good to see: @atthisarts@firedragons.net (and they replied to my post saying they’re happy to discuss any questions re: risks etc)
Backer Update 4 from yesterday - about the experience of being a writer at war - is incredibly powerful and worth reading too:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/atthisarts/embroidered-worlds/posts/3903203
#EmbroideredWorlds #Ukraine #ScienceFiction #SciFi #Books
The square brackets around the hashtags followed by regular brackets and URLs should be interpreted by the client as URLs with link text whatever is in the square brackets - markdown is how it is formatted to do this.
So like:
[#tree](https://pixelfed.social/discover/tags/tree?src=hash) should read #tree in the client.
Strangely, viewing the post here on blahaj.zone, the tree and moss links do display like that, but lichen does not - I suspect because the length of the title (including full URL links) exceeds the allowed title length so it stops parsing the text.
You either have not spent any time reading through the evidence, or are willfully distorting the truth.
Considering their entire argument was to assert with zero evidence it was Ukrainians who did it, then to claim all the evidence showing otherwise is unreliable and we'll never know the truth, I think we can probably answer with a reasonable degree of confidence they are purposefully seeking to mislead.
This is a fantastic conversation (roughly 90 minutes with questions) with Serhii Plokhy and Olia Hercules at the Ukrainian Institute London:
The Russo-Ukrainian War on Youtube
Plokhy is a historian and professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard; he's written books including Gates of Europe, an excellent, readable introduction to Ukrainian history. Hercules is a culinary writer with a focus on her native Ukrainian cuisine; her book Summer Kitchens is just fantastic.
Both bring some incredible insight to the conversation, with such different perspectives on topics ranging from geostrategy and war to language. Just wish somebody had asked Olia a bit about whether the culinary landscape in Ukraine is changing in any way like the language use is!
The talk itself was recorded on 17 May, so a couple of weeks before russia blew up the dam - worth bearing in mind when hearing Olia talk about her family home in Kakhovka. Really powerful stuff.
(PS - not put the link in the URL field this time, let's see what happens...)
It's an interesting article.
I do have some criticisms about how inevitable he portrays this stuff - I'm not sure we can describe any outcome as being 'factually' more likely, considering we don't even know when the war will end nor what shape the peace will take. And the idea that Ukraine will simultaneously be taken over by a clique of oligarchs and western corporations seems a little contradictory - are they oligarchs or not?
(And maybe an interesting observation that he describes the second world war as having one aggressor when it started, when in fact there were two - then as now, far right and far left were closely linked)
But in general he's right that the peace needs considering carefully, not only the war. In any war there is always a risk of what will come after - but these discussions absolutely need to be carried out by Ukrainians, for Ukrainians.
And he's also spot on about the need to fight the extremists at both ends of the spectrum - all extremists need opposing. I've been so disappointed by so many on the left who claim to fight for the rights of working people, but only when it suits them. Like, really quite disheartened when people I previously respected turned out to be supportive of genocide 🙁
Thanks for sharing it.
Sweet Darusya
A Tale of Two Villages
by Maria Matios
Sweet Darusya tells the life story of a Hutsul woman through a series of shorter stories depicting the important scenes in her life that made her who she became. Unusually (for me, at least), the story is told in a reverse chronological order: we meet Sweet Darusya in her later life, and gradually Matios unfolds what came before.
Hutsuls are an ethnic group from Western Ukraine - around Zakarpattia (Transcarpathia) - and Romania, and Matios uses the story of Sweet Darusya to paint a picture of Hutsul life in the mid-20th century. I wonder how much of that life remains, and how much has been lost forever?
Set roughly during the late 1930s up to the 1960s, Matios brings to life the culture and history of these people through the life of Sweet Darusya.
This story is so powerful and moving; incredibly emotional, at once the story of a single woman yet also - through her story - the tale of a whole culture. After finihshing the book, I have a strong desire to visit the region, to see more.
Maria Matios is a Ukrainian author, poet and former-parliamentarian, and winner of the Taras Shevchenko prize (Ukraine's highest award for literature).
Very strongly recommended if you have any interest in Ukraine, or literature - it is not a long book and most will probably get through it in a few days, but well worth the time.
