A look at Iryna Tsilyk’s 'The Earth Is Blue as an Orange'
With the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we were brought back to "Battleship Potemkin" (1925), a silent war film by director Sergei Eisenstein, whose famous Potemkin Stairs scene in Odessa has influenced many filmmakers.
The southern Ukrainian city of Odessa has been bracing for more Russian assault. We visited the recording of Ukrainian filmmaker Iryna Tsilyk who held a documentary masterclass at the Scottish Documentary Institute last year.
Iryna directed "The Earth Is Blue as an Orange," winner of the Directing Award in the World Cinema Documentary at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.
She films the Trofymchuk-Gladky family in the war-zone Ukraine as they create an enchanting world of make-believe in times of disaster.
Filmmaking is the family’s passion. Anna, a single mother of four kids, refuses to flee from the armed conflict. “She started to learn by herself from the internet, what does it mean to edit films, make scripts, so they were shooting shorts, widows all together,” proclaims the Kyiv-born filmmaker. “They were like family film productions.”
How did "The Earth Is Blue as an Orange" materialized? There is a project in Ukraine called Yellow Bus that arranges cinema camps for children in the war zone.
“Two of the girls I met in that cinema camp invited me and my crew to their family, their hometown, located in the red zone,” says Iryna. “We came there and we met the mother Anna and her siblings and when we saw this house full of cats and music, all these conversations about art, discussions.”
The Ukrainian-Lithuanian project, which runs for one hour and 14 minutes, is a film within a film, documenting civilians in the war zone. “We spent one year of filming there and we have been coming again and again,” muses the winner of the 2021 Cinema Eye Honors Awards, US. “We live together, we cook together, talk about everything, and also we were shooting the film.”
The Ukrainian-Lithuanian project, which runs for one hour and 14 minutes, is a film within a film, documenting civilians in the war zone.
Iryna started shooting short films, "Commemoration" and "Home" before shifting to documentary. Most of her themes center on houses and the feeling of a home. “I started from commercials and saw this huge sets with many people and very cool equipment,” she recounts. Later on, she appreciated doing independent productions. “But later I changed my mind totally because I prefer small crews and very simple decisions,” says Iryna.
A few years ago, there was an interest in Ukrainian documentaries. “When the war has started in Ukraine, it seems that many things have changed and also many filmmakers just grabbed the cameras and started to shoot all this reality around us,” says the Kyiv National University of Theater, Cinema, and Television graduate. “I guess Ukrainian documentary cinemas have become much stronger in recent years.”
Iryna decided to try making a cinema almanac about women at war called, "Invisible Battalion." “It’s really important to be the observer of all this reality because we do not have many answers,” stresses the 2020 International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival winner. “But maybe it’s important to ask questions and to fix this reality, here and now. Maybe, one day we will all look back, we will realize what happened to all of us.”
Born in 1982, Iryna is also an author of poetry, prose, and children’s books. According to the Scottish Film Institute, she escaped with her son as she was on a Russian blacklist. Her writer-husband Artem Chekh volunteered to fight in the ongoing war and they did not know when or if they would reunite.
This International Women’s Month, our hearts and thoughts go to Iryna Tsilyk and to all the women filmmakers of Ukraine.