Apr 3, 2024
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Ukraine Fights for Freedom in Song, Film and Television
by Doniphan Blair
Please support our stories by liking articles—thanks!
Members of the Kalush Orchestra, winners of this year's Eurovision festival, in their trademark ethnic punk. photo courtesy: the Kalush OrchestraAMID THE DELUGE OF NEWS FROM
Ukraine, much remains hidden. One little known fact: Ukrainians fight so fiercely because they were slaughtered so mercilessly, literally eight times in the last century, from the Nazi invasion and Holocaust to the Soviet Revolution and fabricated famine (see cineSOURCE article).
Nor do we appreciate how they assuage trauma through art.
On top of Ukraine’s many museums, opera houses and folkloric art centers, there has been an explosion of youth culture, from bands and raves to skaters and fashionistas, and regular culture, from television shows and films to comedy clubs—even during the war—or Kyiv’s lauded PinchukArtCentre, four floors of contemporary art capped by One Love, the popular espresso bar.
In fact, a renaissance started after Ukraine’s Euromaidan Revolution, the ousting of a pro-Russia president in 2014 by months of street protests—not a US-financed coup, as some of my lefty friends continue to claim. It was precisely Ukraine’s robust, 60s-style democracy that drove "Pootie-Poot”—W’s pet name for the tyrant—so mad, he invaded Ukraine days after the closing of the Sochi Winter Olympics, his lavish showcase of Russian success.
In other words, the Russo-Ukrainian War is also an “art war,” pitting creativity, democracy and hope against cynicism, oligarchy and conspiracy theories.
No wonder Ukraine’s entry to the Eurovision Song Contest, “Stefanie” by the Kalush Orchestra, won on May 14th. Or “Klondike” by writer-director Maryna Er Gorbach took best director and grand jury prizes at Sundance and the Seattle International Film Festival, respectively. Or two months earlier, Netflix started streaming “Servant of the People”, a television series starring none other than Volodymyr Zalenskyy, the comedian who became president, first in fiction then in real life, a post-modern success story binding art and politics.
The Kalush Orchestra epitomizes Ukraine’s traditional combination of ancient and current, in this case folk music and hiphop, replete with a break dancer in an ethnic-art body suit, MC KylymMen, which means “carpet man.” Even though Eurovision is half decided by popular vote and Europeans had a pressing, nonmusical reason to support Ukraine, Kalush’s “Stefanie” was infinitely more authentic than England’s operatic extravaganza, Sam Ryder’s “Space Man,” or Spain’s third placer, a standard, Latin-rhythmed seduction song.
Written by front man Oleh Psiuk about his mother, “Stefanie" evokes motherland but doesn’t mention war, as per Eurovision's prohibitions against politics. The day after Russia’s invasion, in fact, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), which runs the contest from the safety of Geneva, Switzerland, ruled Russian musicians could still compete. They recanted the next day.
This is the third time Ukraine took Eurovision gold, in fact, rather impressive for a 30-year-old country competing against 44 others, some with world-famous music industries like England. It was the eighth time, however, it triggered political controversy, according to a Politico article.
Dustups ranged from Ukraine’s 2019 nominee being forced out for having performed in Russia—the Russo-Ukraine War was five years old by then—to criticisms of the single-named Jamala, who won in 2016 with “1944”. About Soviets deporting to Siberia a quarter million of her people, the Crimean Muslim Tatars, “1944” obviously referenced Russia’s seizure of Crimea in 2014, but EBU ruled it fact and history not politics.
Ironically, Ukraine’s first Eurovision win, in the spring of 2004, was with an utterly apolitical tune with nonsense lyrics. But a few months later, after a pro-Russia candidate tried to steal the election, street protests started and turned into the Orange Revolution. When Ukraine hosted the following year, as per Eurovision's tradition, and the Ukrainian band Green Jolly sang “No to falsifications, no to lies,” the EBU made them censor the fraudster’s name.
After Russia was excluded from this year’s Eurovision, its hackers tried to disrupt the vote, in standard Russian tradition, but failed, according to Italian police. Hours after Kalush’s closing performance, Psiuk kissed his girlfriend goodbye and flew home to join the army and Carpet Man. Already in uniform, he wasn’t even granted leave to perform at Eurovision.
With “Stefanie” booming through bunkers and trenches as well as clubs and headsets across Ukraine, Kalush’s efforts both artistic and military will help determine the outcome of the struggle. Sadly, its brutality and probable longevity convinced EBU to cancel the 67th Eurovision next year in Kyiv, and hand that role to runner-up England. On May 30th, Kalush sold their crystal microphone Eurovision trophy for $900,000 to WhiteBit, a cryptocurrency firm, to buy drones for the Ukrainian Army.
Oksana Cherkashyna, playing Irka, in front of her bombed out house in Eastern Ukraine, from the new Ukrainian movie “Klondike”. photo courtesy: Maryna Er Gorbach"Klondike”, by writer/director Maryna Er Gorbach and produced by a Turkish filmmaker, Mehmet Bahadir Er, who happens to be her husband, is an indie masterpiece, in the manner of Cronenberg’s 1996 “Crash”: spooky, realistic and artistic, but with the added slam of being pointedly political and matriarchal.
I was lucky enough to catch it at the San Francisco International Film Festival on May 1st, after racing across town to grab my pro-Ukraine T-shirt and convincing the Berkeley Museum Theater staff to let me in, even though I just lost my driver’s license, which was required for entry along with a vaccination card.
Gorbach uses a slow, dramatic build of human interactions, in perfectly framed shots, often filmed at the glowing height of magic hour, to portray the bloated-with-baby Irka trying to run a small farm with her gruff but loving husband, Tolik, in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region. That was where the war started in 2014 and today is the site of a World War Two-style artillery duel killing thousands.
Irka is played to smoldering, slowly empowering effect by Oksana Cherkashyna, in her first starring role, who showed up to the Berkeley Museum screening as if this was a regular film festival tour. Unfortunately, her co-star Sergey Shadrin, who rendered Tolik rather nicely, couldn’t make it, having died of natural causes shortly before the film’s final cut was finished.
“Klondike”, the title of which suggests the Russian invasion is a resource grab, starts in low light and mystery, in a 360-degree pan around a large, modestly-modern farmhouse which, we eventually realize, is missing its front, sheared off by a shell. Bit by bit, more and more war intrudes, from Russian soldiers appropriating livestock to a body from Malaysian Flight 17—shot down on July 17, 2014, by Russians not Ukrainians, as some Russophiles still say—landing on their doorstep, or a wing of the shot-down airplane being hauled away in the background.
There is also the dramatic and horrific denouement, which wraps up the story of the pregnancy, and the arrival of Irka’s brother, inspired by the Euromaidan Revolution a few months earlier, who shows up to bring her back to Kyiv for safety and a normal childbirth. One lovely bit has Irka filling the samovar for tea only to, when her brother and husband come to blows, douse them with boiling water, as Gorbach tightens the noose on a political, personal and character-driven story.
Gorbach graduated from the Andrzej Wajda School of Film Directing in Warsaw, Poland, after studying at Kyiv’s National Theatre and the Cinema & Television University. Barely 40, she now has four features under her belt, including “Omar and Us” (2019), about a Turkish soldier’s tough return to civilian life, written by hubby Mehmet, with whom she codirected two more, the 2013 “Love Me”, a lushly-detailed, trouble-in-paradise romance, and the comedy “No Ofsayt” (2009).
At the screening, Cherkashyna was beautiful and bubbly—so unlike her bedraggled Irka as to be unrecognizable—until I asked her if the filmmakers got push back from portraying successionist, Russian-speaking Ukrainians sympathetically. Humanizing villains is standard to drama but hard with war-torn audiences. A dark cloud descended and her explanation drifted through a few questions until she said something like, “I didn’t realize until this invasion that so many of my country people were heroes.”
She is one of them, of course, along with Gorbach, attempting to hold murderers accountable through imaginative storytelling in our new era of hybrid warfare, where we must fight cyberwar and conspiracy theories as well as tanks and missiles. Given the success of “Klondike”, Gorbach will undoubtedly go on to produce an epic about Ukraine’s underdog army and their Churchillian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who played the president in his production company's 'Servant of the People', in the apartment his character shares with his mother, niece and father. photo courtesy: Studio KvartalObviously, the most incredible art war achievement emerging from Ukraine, if not history in general, is how a comedian created a television show that launched him into the presidency just in time to become a fearless wartime president, a tricky turnaround he executed brilliantly.
Zelenskyy plays Vasily Petrovych Goloborodko, a high school history teacher, who is filmed ranting to a colleague about the upcoming election and how no one cares, “we always vote for the lesser of two assholes,” and he could do a much better job. When the kid with the phone camera uploads it and it goes viral, his students enter him unbeknownst in the presidential election.
“Servant of the People”, which ran for three seasons (2015-19) and 51 episodes, 40 to 90 minutes in length, is a sophisticated satire, dry humor marked by occasional absurdity and elevated by Zalensky’s excellent acting and resonant voice, skills which translated well to his war-time performance (see it on Netflix here).
It also includes a family sitcom, since Goloborodko, undoubtedly a joke name in Ukrainian, lives at home with his cabbie father, professor mother, and comely niece. Indeed, although the first episode opens with mysterious power players agreeing to let the Ukrainians choose their own president for once, its first major scene starts with Vasily’s father arguing in front of their flat, which wakes him up.
Realizing he is late for class, Goloborodko has to hustle to make coffee, iron his shirt, and usurp his niece to get a turn on the toilet. Indeed, it is there, reading peacefully, that he is interrupted by the arrival of the slick, statuesque Prime Minister Chuiko, played to perfection by Stanislav Boklan, and his entourage who inform Goloborodko he’s been elected president.
Even before that opening, however, the title sequence shows a Kyiv not unlike my hometown of Oakland, with ships and cranes, industrial and all-glass buildings, multi-laned freeways and bike paths, along which Vasily bikes to school—portraying a normalcy that makes the country’s collapse into total war that much more poignant.
While President Goloborodko is the central story, “Servant of the People” keeps flashing back to his life as a teacher or at home, where his family immediately starts leveraging his new position and income. Even though it periodically slips into farce or slapstick, Ukrainian life is satirized slyly, contrasting the opulence of being president and corruption of the oligarchs with an average honest man simply doing the right thing.
Ukrainian politics is skewered mercilessly, however, from an opposing candidate refusing to concede to the former president refusing to leave, hardly a joke in today’s America. The latter impasse leads to Episode 4’s tour de force climax as Prime Minister Chuiko tries to coax his old friend the ex-president—now drunk, dissembling and exhibiting the homoeroticism common but denied across Eastern Europe—to exit the presidential palace.
When Chuiko gives up, saying “Send in the SWAT team,” Goloborodko takes over, drawing on a technique he used to oust his predecessor at the high school: a hilarious pissing contest with each trying to out-quote the other with old sayings.
“Servant of the People” was so immediately popular, Zalenskyy and his production company produced a feature film, “Servant of the People 2” (2016), between season one and two. About President Goloborodko outsmarting the oligarchs in order to reform the country and get IMF aid, it gives the lie to claims that those aspirations were imposed by the West.
Zelenskyy is a talented producer as well as entertainer and actor, who started a comedy troupe, Kvartal 95, with his high school friends, and helped it grow into Studio Kvartal, the producer of famous film and television shows. He also toured Russia doing standup (he's a native Russian-speaker), won Ukraine’s “Dancing with the Stars” in 2006, and acted in eight movies.
Not only was “Servant of the People” smack on the nose, Zelenskyy campaigned for president by presenting his comedy act. While this oddly parallels Trump’s use of his “Apprentice” fame and character to win the American presidency, Zelenskyy clowned honestly and then put joking aside to voice sincere anti-corruption and humanist views, the very opposite of the cynicism and conspiracy theories of Trump and Putin. Indeed, Zelenskyy is the archetypal anti-Trump as well as anti-Putin, neither of whom can give let alone take a joke.
Ukraine also figured in the Trump Administration, of course, from Trump hiring to manage his campaign Paul Manafort, fresh from his years promoting pro-Russian Ukrainian candidates, to his blaming Russian election interference on Ukraine and the notorious “perfect phone call,” when he tried to blackmail Zelenskyy to dig up dirt on the Bidens in exchange for desperately needed military equipment. Zelenskyy held the American president at bay with comparative ease, however, given he was a good Jewish boy who got a law degree before venturing into comedy.
As if “Servant of the People”’s making-of story wasn’t spectacular enough, it morphed into the Servant of the People political party whose head has become an international hero, leading not only Ukraine’s storied defense against the most terrible tyrant of our time but a new enthusiasm for democracy, after it has been in decline from Hungary and Poland to Brazil and The Philippines. Yes, Zelenskyy needs high tech artillery and other supplies as soon as possible, but Ukrainian song, television and film is more than able to inspire his people as well as the rest of us, telling that story for the near future and perhaps all of time.
Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached .
Posted on Jul 07, 2022 - 02:34 PM
by Doniphan Blair
Please support our stories by liking articles—thanks!
Members of the Kalush Orchestra, winners of this year's Eurovision festival, in their trademark ethnic punk. photo courtesy: the Kalush OrchestraUkraine, much remains hidden. One little known fact: Ukrainians fight so fiercely because they were slaughtered so mercilessly, literally eight times in the last century, from the Nazi invasion and Holocaust to the Soviet Revolution and fabricated famine (see cineSOURCE article).
Nor do we appreciate how they assuage trauma through art.
On top of Ukraine’s many museums, opera houses and folkloric art centers, there has been an explosion of youth culture, from bands and raves to skaters and fashionistas, and regular culture, from television shows and films to comedy clubs—even during the war—or Kyiv’s lauded PinchukArtCentre, four floors of contemporary art capped by One Love, the popular espresso bar.
In fact, a renaissance started after Ukraine’s Euromaidan Revolution, the ousting of a pro-Russia president in 2014 by months of street protests—not a US-financed coup, as some of my lefty friends continue to claim. It was precisely Ukraine’s robust, 60s-style democracy that drove "Pootie-Poot”—W’s pet name for the tyrant—so mad, he invaded Ukraine days after the closing of the Sochi Winter Olympics, his lavish showcase of Russian success.
In other words, the Russo-Ukrainian War is also an “art war,” pitting creativity, democracy and hope against cynicism, oligarchy and conspiracy theories.
No wonder Ukraine’s entry to the Eurovision Song Contest, “Stefanie” by the Kalush Orchestra, won on May 14th. Or “Klondike” by writer-director Maryna Er Gorbach took best director and grand jury prizes at Sundance and the Seattle International Film Festival, respectively. Or two months earlier, Netflix started streaming “Servant of the People”, a television series starring none other than Volodymyr Zalenskyy, the comedian who became president, first in fiction then in real life, a post-modern success story binding art and politics.
The Kalush Orchestra epitomizes Ukraine’s traditional combination of ancient and current, in this case folk music and hiphop, replete with a break dancer in an ethnic-art body suit, MC KylymMen, which means “carpet man.” Even though Eurovision is half decided by popular vote and Europeans had a pressing, nonmusical reason to support Ukraine, Kalush’s “Stefanie” was infinitely more authentic than England’s operatic extravaganza, Sam Ryder’s “Space Man,” or Spain’s third placer, a standard, Latin-rhythmed seduction song.
Written by front man Oleh Psiuk about his mother, “Stefanie" evokes motherland but doesn’t mention war, as per Eurovision's prohibitions against politics. The day after Russia’s invasion, in fact, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), which runs the contest from the safety of Geneva, Switzerland, ruled Russian musicians could still compete. They recanted the next day.
This is the third time Ukraine took Eurovision gold, in fact, rather impressive for a 30-year-old country competing against 44 others, some with world-famous music industries like England. It was the eighth time, however, it triggered political controversy, according to a Politico article.
Dustups ranged from Ukraine’s 2019 nominee being forced out for having performed in Russia—the Russo-Ukraine War was five years old by then—to criticisms of the single-named Jamala, who won in 2016 with “1944”. About Soviets deporting to Siberia a quarter million of her people, the Crimean Muslim Tatars, “1944” obviously referenced Russia’s seizure of Crimea in 2014, but EBU ruled it fact and history not politics.
Ironically, Ukraine’s first Eurovision win, in the spring of 2004, was with an utterly apolitical tune with nonsense lyrics. But a few months later, after a pro-Russia candidate tried to steal the election, street protests started and turned into the Orange Revolution. When Ukraine hosted the following year, as per Eurovision's tradition, and the Ukrainian band Green Jolly sang “No to falsifications, no to lies,” the EBU made them censor the fraudster’s name.
After Russia was excluded from this year’s Eurovision, its hackers tried to disrupt the vote, in standard Russian tradition, but failed, according to Italian police. Hours after Kalush’s closing performance, Psiuk kissed his girlfriend goodbye and flew home to join the army and Carpet Man. Already in uniform, he wasn’t even granted leave to perform at Eurovision.
With “Stefanie” booming through bunkers and trenches as well as clubs and headsets across Ukraine, Kalush’s efforts both artistic and military will help determine the outcome of the struggle. Sadly, its brutality and probable longevity convinced EBU to cancel the 67th Eurovision next year in Kyiv, and hand that role to runner-up England. On May 30th, Kalush sold their crystal microphone Eurovision trophy for $900,000 to WhiteBit, a cryptocurrency firm, to buy drones for the Ukrainian Army.
Oksana Cherkashyna, playing Irka, in front of her bombed out house in Eastern Ukraine, from the new Ukrainian movie “Klondike”. photo courtesy: Maryna Er GorbachI was lucky enough to catch it at the San Francisco International Film Festival on May 1st, after racing across town to grab my pro-Ukraine T-shirt and convincing the Berkeley Museum Theater staff to let me in, even though I just lost my driver’s license, which was required for entry along with a vaccination card.
Gorbach uses a slow, dramatic build of human interactions, in perfectly framed shots, often filmed at the glowing height of magic hour, to portray the bloated-with-baby Irka trying to run a small farm with her gruff but loving husband, Tolik, in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region. That was where the war started in 2014 and today is the site of a World War Two-style artillery duel killing thousands.
Irka is played to smoldering, slowly empowering effect by Oksana Cherkashyna, in her first starring role, who showed up to the Berkeley Museum screening as if this was a regular film festival tour. Unfortunately, her co-star Sergey Shadrin, who rendered Tolik rather nicely, couldn’t make it, having died of natural causes shortly before the film’s final cut was finished.
“Klondike”, the title of which suggests the Russian invasion is a resource grab, starts in low light and mystery, in a 360-degree pan around a large, modestly-modern farmhouse which, we eventually realize, is missing its front, sheared off by a shell. Bit by bit, more and more war intrudes, from Russian soldiers appropriating livestock to a body from Malaysian Flight 17—shot down on July 17, 2014, by Russians not Ukrainians, as some Russophiles still say—landing on their doorstep, or a wing of the shot-down airplane being hauled away in the background.
There is also the dramatic and horrific denouement, which wraps up the story of the pregnancy, and the arrival of Irka’s brother, inspired by the Euromaidan Revolution a few months earlier, who shows up to bring her back to Kyiv for safety and a normal childbirth. One lovely bit has Irka filling the samovar for tea only to, when her brother and husband come to blows, douse them with boiling water, as Gorbach tightens the noose on a political, personal and character-driven story.
Gorbach graduated from the Andrzej Wajda School of Film Directing in Warsaw, Poland, after studying at Kyiv’s National Theatre and the Cinema & Television University. Barely 40, she now has four features under her belt, including “Omar and Us” (2019), about a Turkish soldier’s tough return to civilian life, written by hubby Mehmet, with whom she codirected two more, the 2013 “Love Me”, a lushly-detailed, trouble-in-paradise romance, and the comedy “No Ofsayt” (2009).
At the screening, Cherkashyna was beautiful and bubbly—so unlike her bedraggled Irka as to be unrecognizable—until I asked her if the filmmakers got push back from portraying successionist, Russian-speaking Ukrainians sympathetically. Humanizing villains is standard to drama but hard with war-torn audiences. A dark cloud descended and her explanation drifted through a few questions until she said something like, “I didn’t realize until this invasion that so many of my country people were heroes.”
She is one of them, of course, along with Gorbach, attempting to hold murderers accountable through imaginative storytelling in our new era of hybrid warfare, where we must fight cyberwar and conspiracy theories as well as tanks and missiles. Given the success of “Klondike”, Gorbach will undoubtedly go on to produce an epic about Ukraine’s underdog army and their Churchillian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who played the president in his production company's 'Servant of the People', in the apartment his character shares with his mother, niece and father. photo courtesy: Studio KvartalZelenskyy plays Vasily Petrovych Goloborodko, a high school history teacher, who is filmed ranting to a colleague about the upcoming election and how no one cares, “we always vote for the lesser of two assholes,” and he could do a much better job. When the kid with the phone camera uploads it and it goes viral, his students enter him unbeknownst in the presidential election.
“Servant of the People”, which ran for three seasons (2015-19) and 51 episodes, 40 to 90 minutes in length, is a sophisticated satire, dry humor marked by occasional absurdity and elevated by Zalensky’s excellent acting and resonant voice, skills which translated well to his war-time performance (see it on Netflix here).
It also includes a family sitcom, since Goloborodko, undoubtedly a joke name in Ukrainian, lives at home with his cabbie father, professor mother, and comely niece. Indeed, although the first episode opens with mysterious power players agreeing to let the Ukrainians choose their own president for once, its first major scene starts with Vasily’s father arguing in front of their flat, which wakes him up.
Realizing he is late for class, Goloborodko has to hustle to make coffee, iron his shirt, and usurp his niece to get a turn on the toilet. Indeed, it is there, reading peacefully, that he is interrupted by the arrival of the slick, statuesque Prime Minister Chuiko, played to perfection by Stanislav Boklan, and his entourage who inform Goloborodko he’s been elected president.
Even before that opening, however, the title sequence shows a Kyiv not unlike my hometown of Oakland, with ships and cranes, industrial and all-glass buildings, multi-laned freeways and bike paths, along which Vasily bikes to school—portraying a normalcy that makes the country’s collapse into total war that much more poignant.
While President Goloborodko is the central story, “Servant of the People” keeps flashing back to his life as a teacher or at home, where his family immediately starts leveraging his new position and income. Even though it periodically slips into farce or slapstick, Ukrainian life is satirized slyly, contrasting the opulence of being president and corruption of the oligarchs with an average honest man simply doing the right thing.
Ukrainian politics is skewered mercilessly, however, from an opposing candidate refusing to concede to the former president refusing to leave, hardly a joke in today’s America. The latter impasse leads to Episode 4’s tour de force climax as Prime Minister Chuiko tries to coax his old friend the ex-president—now drunk, dissembling and exhibiting the homoeroticism common but denied across Eastern Europe—to exit the presidential palace.
When Chuiko gives up, saying “Send in the SWAT team,” Goloborodko takes over, drawing on a technique he used to oust his predecessor at the high school: a hilarious pissing contest with each trying to out-quote the other with old sayings.
“Servant of the People” was so immediately popular, Zalenskyy and his production company produced a feature film, “Servant of the People 2” (2016), between season one and two. About President Goloborodko outsmarting the oligarchs in order to reform the country and get IMF aid, it gives the lie to claims that those aspirations were imposed by the West.
Zelenskyy is a talented producer as well as entertainer and actor, who started a comedy troupe, Kvartal 95, with his high school friends, and helped it grow into Studio Kvartal, the producer of famous film and television shows. He also toured Russia doing standup (he's a native Russian-speaker), won Ukraine’s “Dancing with the Stars” in 2006, and acted in eight movies.
Not only was “Servant of the People” smack on the nose, Zelenskyy campaigned for president by presenting his comedy act. While this oddly parallels Trump’s use of his “Apprentice” fame and character to win the American presidency, Zelenskyy clowned honestly and then put joking aside to voice sincere anti-corruption and humanist views, the very opposite of the cynicism and conspiracy theories of Trump and Putin. Indeed, Zelenskyy is the archetypal anti-Trump as well as anti-Putin, neither of whom can give let alone take a joke.
Ukraine also figured in the Trump Administration, of course, from Trump hiring to manage his campaign Paul Manafort, fresh from his years promoting pro-Russian Ukrainian candidates, to his blaming Russian election interference on Ukraine and the notorious “perfect phone call,” when he tried to blackmail Zelenskyy to dig up dirt on the Bidens in exchange for desperately needed military equipment. Zelenskyy held the American president at bay with comparative ease, however, given he was a good Jewish boy who got a law degree before venturing into comedy.
As if “Servant of the People”’s making-of story wasn’t spectacular enough, it morphed into the Servant of the People political party whose head has become an international hero, leading not only Ukraine’s storied defense against the most terrible tyrant of our time but a new enthusiasm for democracy, after it has been in decline from Hungary and Poland to Brazil and The Philippines. Yes, Zelenskyy needs high tech artillery and other supplies as soon as possible, but Ukrainian song, television and film is more than able to inspire his people as well as the rest of us, telling that story for the near future and perhaps all of time.
Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached .
Posted on Jul 07, 2022 - 02:34 PM
