Maidan: A Tale of Two Movies

Maidan: A Tale of Two Movies

One is in the running for an Oscar, another, very different take aired on French television despite Kyiv’s objections.

2 February 2016

Ukraine’s embassy in Paris dismissed it as “not only dishonest, but completely disrespectful” to those who died on Kyiv’s Independence square in early 2014.But the Maidan uprising documentary was shown on French Canal Plus television 1 February over their objections.

 

The embassy slammed Paul Moreira’s film, “Ukraine: Masks of the Revolution,” as “sensationalism” employing “primitive methods of journalistic manipulation” serving a highly slanted interpretation of the violence on the Maidan as well as the Odessa incident where over 40 people died in a burning building during a clash between supporters and opponents of the government that took over following President Viktor Yanukovych’s flight in February 2014.

 

The film’s take on those events closely resembles the version disseminated by the Kremlin, according to Kyiv-friendly Radio Free Europe.

 

“In a nutshell, according to Moreira (pictured), it was right-wing extremists who ousted Viktor Yanukovych during the 2013-14 Euromaidan demonstrations…. The West is complicit as well, turning a blind eye to the extremists’ crimes, including deadly violence in the southern city of Odesa in May 2014.

 

“Why? Because Ukraine was merely a ‘pawn’ – albeit a crucial one – in the greater geopolitical tug-of-war between the Kremlin and the West.”

 

Far more people will probably watch another Maidan film with a very different narrative of the uprising, thanks to its being nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Documentary category.

 

The Netflix documentary “Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom” is the first film co-produced by a Ukrainian to get an Oscar nomination. But the four Ukrainians among 28 cinematographers whose work appears in the film are getting little attention abroad, says the Kyiv Post, whose publisher, Mohammad Zahoor, provided them with editing equipment for free.

 

Co-director Evgeny Afineevsky told Screen Daily he wanted to portray a “story of injustice” and the youthful uprising against the “dictatorship” of the Yanukovych regime.

 

 

  • “I knew I would run into virulent opposition and be accused of playing [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s game and reprising elements of his propaganda,” Moreira wrote on his blog.

 

  • Moreira is following a tradition begun by the Viktor Yanukovych regime and pushed by Putin, who tried to justify Russia’s interference in Ukraine’s matters as being because of “the orgy of nationalists, extremists and anti-Semites on the streets of Kyiv,” Ukrainian activist and journalist Halya Coynash wrote. 

 

  • According to Coynash, the film wrongly claims most of the over 100 people killed on the Maidan were “members of the militias,” and makes no mention of the Russian takeover of Crimea and its support for rebels in the eastern Donbas region.

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