Filmmaker Iryna Tsilyk: Animating Ukraine’s War

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary

4.3 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 4 December 2023

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Iryna Tsilyk is one of Ukraine’s best known young documentary makers. She made her name following the lives of soldiers, female paramedics and families living on the frontline in East Ukraine after the region was taken over by Moscow-backed separatists. However after Russia’s full-scale invasion brought the war to Iryna’s home city of Kyiv, she decided she could no longer stay behind the camera. So, in her current project, The Red Zone, Iryna is turning the lens on herself and her family.

Iryna’s husband, Artem Chekh, is a well-known novelist and journalist. He volunteered to join the army and found himself in Bakhmut, scene of some of the bloodiest fighting. For five days Iryna did not know if he was alive or dead. She is focusing on the anguish she felt over this period and using a series of flashbacks to illustrate their past lives in peacetime.

Iryna tells Lucy Ash that to give herself more artistic freedom she has decided on a radical new tool for her work: this film will be an animation. Making films in wartime is a challenge and animation is expensive but Iryna has foreign backers and is determined to tell her own story in her own way.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The at the story's making the headlines with insights from the BBC's global network of
0:14.7	experts. Search for the Global Story wherever you get your BBC podcasts. I'm a Ukrainian woman, an artist, I'm a filmmaker and poet, and also I'm the wife of a soldier I'm the mother of a teenager we live in a completely
0:39.4	weird reality. With her reality shifting, Ukrainian documentary maker Ira Nisyllic
0:46.2	wants to change the way she makes her films. It's quite scary to try something completely new, but we will have so many films about Russia's
0:57.4	war in Ukraine soon, how to be unique among other voices.
1:03.0	So Irena's turning to animation and putting herself at the center of the action.
1:08.0	This project Red Zone will take at least four or five years of my life.
1:14.0	At the same time, I can't predict anything because most of Ukrainians today,
1:20.0	we don't have this opportunity to have plans for the future.
1:27.0	Welcome to the documentary in the studio from the BBC World Service.
1:32.0	I'm Lucy Ash and in this episode we're following Arena
1:35.9	as she embarks on her animated film. It's got a working title of The Red Zone which is
1:41.0	shorthand for an area of danger and conflict.
1:45.0	In Kyiv today a frightening new dawn for Europe and Ukraine.
1:51.0	This city of 3 million awoke to sirens and an invasion.
1:57.0	We first speak in June this year.
1:59.2	I'm in London and I'm in London and Irena is at home in her family's high-rise apartment in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv.
2:06.0	I'm sitting on a bed and I'm worrying that my cat could be probably too loud.
2:11.0	What's her name? Her name is Panacotta, but she's not Italian.
2:16.0	She's a true Ukrainian cat.
2:18.8	Erena's relaxed tone is deceptive.
2:21.6	She tells me she's exhausted from many nights of interrupted sleep.
	...

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