ANT!PODE Sales & Distribution, Moscow-based World Sales agent, announced a successful deal with the largest art TV channel in Europe, ZDF/Arte.
The French-German TV holding bought the screening rights for a short TV version (52 minutes) of the documentary Museum ‘Revolution’ created by the director Nataliya Babintseva. The film was produced in Russia by the KinoKI Studio run by Anatoly Golubovsky and Denis Branitsky.
First Russian information screening took place in December 2014 at ArtDoсFest, the main Russian festival of documentary cinema. During 2015, the film traveled from one festival to another (PLANETE Doc Film Festival, Poland; LET’S CEE Film Festival, Vienna, Austria; Kasseler Dokfest, Germany; Cottbus IFF, Germany) and received a money award and the Innsbruck University Prize at the 24th International Film Festival Innsbruck (Austria). On 23 October, the film concluded the program of the Artdocfest/RigaIFF in Riga, Latvia. It is now heading to Göteborg (Sweden) and Trieste (Italy).
The film was shot in Kyiv during the events of the Ukrainian Revolution and in Vienna where the curator Konstantin Akinsha made an exposition of Maidan artifacts in Künstlerhaus, under the name I Am a Drop in the Ocean: he believed that “this revolution was necessary from aesthetic point of view”. Some of the materials were offered by the Ukrainian directing team BABYLON’13. The film shows a great variety of artistic manifestations, from professional artists to the ordinary people that took part in the revolution, framed by direct speech of authors and by commentaries from well-known art critics. The film features Aleksandr Roitburd, Nikita Shalenyi, Aleksey Say, Ivan Semesyuk (‘Artistic Barbacan’), Oleksa Mann (‘Artistic Barbacan’), Pavel Klubnikin (‘Straikplakat’), art critic Alisa Lozhkina, poet Artyom Polezhaka, pianist Marian Mitsik.
Museification by Babintseva is especially interesting because it shows the heterogeneity characteristic of the Maidan, bringing out clearly that any ‘evolutionary approach’ to the art is inadequate. Indeed, the range of world views operating in the same space, giving birth to naïve archaic protective amulets and to the conceptual imagery of a performance, making these two kinds of manifestations equally relevant and efficient – is an observation, which is unexpected and in the same time important from the culturologic point of view and therefore deserving close attention, – Ilya Bobylev, Iskusstvo kino.
Maidan is an artistic phenomenon – author of the film Museum ‘Revolution’
— Credits between the episodes include two slogans used by the French situationists in 1960s. One of them is about the street performance, another is about the art which is everywhere. From the aesthetic and philosophical point of view (Aleksey – editor’s note) Mann, Semesyuk and K° were right. I saw the recordings of the Tahrir Square Revolution, films about other ‘color revolutions’, and such an aesthetisation of the space was never there. It is very interesting to state that it happened only at the Maidan in Kyiv.
— Maidan was not even a myth. It was a living history that just acquired new heroes, unexpected visual clichés. But it seems to me that later this feeling disappeared. Perhaps that is why my film has such a conclusion (the film is concluded by the scenes of the war parade in May 2015 – editor’s note). Some people do not like my conclusion. I felt I did not understand how they could treat the Maidan, a place of memory, in this way, I felt a kind of injustice. Yes, we needed to separate from the Maidan but, to my mind, it needed to be otherwise. This feeling of mine did not become a part of film but it contained an episode with all the heroes of the film discussing what should be done with this place later. And some really utopian ideas have been put forth. Nataliya Babintseva, Radio Svoboda, Ukraine
Burned stones and painted helmets: is it possible to museify the Maidan?
Such scenes as the improvised tribunal of fake Yanukovych, as the guy from the Artistic Hundred who prides in his naïve painting of the helmet, as the new custodian of Mezhihirye, never smiling, who puts around him a flag as an Emperor’s cloak — they look strange, sometimes weird and inappropriate, making spectators uncomfortable, – Asya Bazdyreva, Ukrainska pravda
Museum ‘Revolution’ : Beyond the Bounds of Good and Evil
Most films about revolution focus exclusively on documenting it. In such films there is no rethinking of the Kyiv events of the winter 2013-2014, there is no clear limit between the Good and the Evil. Indeed, now, a year and a half after the Euromaidan, it may be harder to see the difference between the positive and the negative sides of the revolution.
But Babintseva’s film follows an evident formula: the Good is beautiful while the Evil is ugly. It makes the difference between them more striking. The epicenter of good in the film is the Euromaidan; the kingdom of ugliness is Yanukovych’s residence in Mezhihirya. The latter, according to the opinion voiced in the film by the art critic Alisa Lozhkina, is built in the unique style of ‘Donetsk Bykokko’ (Translator’s note: Donetsk, the native city of President Yanukovych, was one of his main support bases; bykokko is a pun on ‘baroque’ and ‘bykovat’, the Russian slang word meaning ‘to be rude to people in a gangster’s way), – Anton Filatov, ESPRESO
One of the main ideas of the film is the confrontation between the precise popular art born at the Maidan and the bad taste of Mezhihirya. “This revolution was necessary from aesthetic point of view”, affirms one of the characters of the film, the curator of the exposition I Am a Drop in the Ocean that took place in Vienna, Konstantin Akinsha. And one of the slogans periodically appearing on the screen says: “Bad taste is socially dangerous”.
All this needed a large social canvas, that would bring everything together in one picture and justify it.
That is why the film addresses the Maidan as a kind of global artwork. This idea was in the air since the first weeks of the protest.
…Faint notes of this grotesque appear in the film itself – in every scene with a reference to New Middle Ages. It is here that the idea comes to the mind: a question about the museification of the Maidan in the near future should probably be postponed. Ukrainian educational and artistic institutions do not yet manage to create a competent story that could include burned stones and rags from the Maidan.
And while such lacunas in the understanding of our own culture need filling, such works as ‘Revolution’ Museum are necessary as a document of the period, as a fixation of images, practices and opinions. – Maria GENYK, Day-Kiev, Odesa