This is a collection of films and documentaries depicting Ukraine.
Winter On Fire: Ukraine's Fight for Freedom
A documentary on the unrest in Ukraine during 2013 and 2014, as student demonstrations supporting European integration grew into a violent revolution calling for the resignation of President Viktor F. Yanukovich.
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Chernobyl
On April 26, 1986, the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Soviet Union suffered a massive explosion. This gripping five-part miniseries tells the powerful and visceral story of the worst man-made accident in history, following the tragedy from the moment of the early-morning explosion through the chaos and loss of life in the ensuing days, weeks and months.
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Mr. Jones
In 1933, Gareth Jones is an ambitious young journalist who has gained some renown for his interview with Adolf Hitler. Thanks to his connections to Lloyd George, the former British prime minister, he is able to get official permission to travel to the Soviet Union. Jones intends to try to interview Stalin and to find out more about the Soviet Union's economic expansion and its apparently-successful five-year development plan.
Jones is restricted to Moscow but jumps his train and travels unofficially to Ukraine to discover evidence of the Holodomor, including empty villages, starving people, cannibalism and the enforced collection of grain. On his return to Britain, he struggles to get his story taken seriously. The film ends by recording that Jones died while reporting in Inner Mongolia with a guide who was secretly connected to the Soviet secret service.
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Between Hitler and Stalin: Ukraine in World War II, The Untold Story
This is a 2003 film produced and directed by Slavko Nowytski and narrated by Jack Palance. The one-hour documentary, part black-and-white and part color, is a project of Ukrainian Canadian Research and Documentation Centre – an attempt to tell the story of World War II from a Ukrainian perspective.
The film chronicles the struggle between the Nazi and Soviet regimes, from a Ukrainian perspective. The documentary recounts the events in Ukraine on the brink of the Second World War, during the Soviet occupation of Western Ukraine (1939–1941), the German-Soviet War, the Nazi occupation of Ukraine and the second Soviet occupation of Western Ukraine (1944).
The impact of these events, which claimed 8 to 10 million Ukrainian lives, is depicted through segments on the “scorched-earth” policies of both powers; the tragedy of the Jews; and the 2.3 million Ukrainians taken as slave labourers (Ostarbeiters). The Ukrainians’ struggle against the Nazi occupiers and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army’s fight—against both totalitarian powers—for Ukraine’s independence are is portrayed.
The film also deals with the forcible repatriation of Ukrainians to the Soviet Union, Displaced Persons (D.P.) camps and emigration. Between Hitler and Stalin features eyewitness accounts, documentary material, rare film footage, photos and documents obtained from myriad sources.
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Harvest of Despair
Holodomor - often called the forgotten holocaust - a time when Stalin was dumping millions of tons of wheat on Western markets, while in Ukraine, men, women, and children were dying of starvation at the rate of 25,000 a day, 17 human beings a minute. Seven to ten million people perished in a famine caused not by war or natural disasters, but by ruthless decree.
To commemorate the 50th anniversary of this tragedy the Ukrainian Canadian Research and Documentation Centre (formerly Ukrainian Famine Research Committee) gathered materials, sought out eye-witnesses and documented this horrific event. Harvest of Despair is the product of this effort.
The documentary probes the tragic consequences of Ukraine's struggle for greater cultural and political autonomy in the 1920s and 1930s. Through rare archival footage, the results of Stalin's lethal countermeasures unfold in harrowing detail.
Harvest of Despair examines why this man-made famine remains so little known. Blinded by radical leftwing ideals, world statesmen, such as Edouard Herriot, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists and writers such as George Bernard Shaw, all contributed to the regime's campaign of concealment. Even the democratic governments of the depression-hit West preferred to remain silent over Soviet Russia's atrocities in order to continue import and export trade.
In 1932-33, roughly one-quarter of the entire population of Ukraine perished through brutal starvation. Harvest of Despair, through its stark, haunting images, provides the eloquent testimony of a lost generation that has been silenced too long.