PANAJI: The filmmaking community needs to step up and speak up against the Russia-Ukraine war, Russian-origin filmmaker Boris Guts said at the International Film Festival of India (IFFI) on Friday.
“I think the film and the story telling (community), so far, is very slow (to react) to the situation. I think we must react more quickly. Because cinema is a very strong language. I think it’s very good that filmmakers from Russia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan, etc can show their movies here in India,” said Guts, whose film ‘Deaf Lovers’, a romantic drama set in Istanbul, was screened at the festival.
“She is a citizen of Ukraine and he is a citizen of Russia and they are meeting after the beginning of war that we all know about. And though this movie is not political per se, the main point I am trying to make is that nowadays we have forgotten how to listen to each other and that we need to learn how to listen to each other, otherwise the war will consume and kill all of us,” Guts said. The filmmaker added that he had been living in Serbia for several years.
The film, ‘Deaf Lovers’, was initially included in the ‘Standing with Ukraine’ selection at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF) in Estonia, but was dropped at the request of the Ukrainian State Film Agency which said, it carried “the risk of propaganda justifying [Russian] aggression”. The film, however, continued to be in the main competition section.
Karim, an Uzbekistan actor who attended the screening of his film ‘The Song Sustxotin’, a poignant tale set in a drought-stricken Uzbek village”, said present day Russia was very different from the erstwhile USSR.
“I am from the USSR. Back then, we didn’t have a separation between Uzbek, Ukraine, Russia, etc and when I started working in the 80s it was a very different landscape. Right now what I think we have to do is unite people through the medium of cinema because it’s a very powerful medium… It’s one of the ways we can try to heal those things,” Karim said.
The film, ‘House’, a moving narrative from Uzbekistan directed by Jamshid Narzikulov, was also screened on Friday. The story follows a grieving widow who loses her only son to a reckless online challenge, an official statement said.