A few days ago, the Traveling Docudays UA festival ended in Kremenchuk. The post-festival period is a good opportunity to think about the most prominent events and to sum up the experience. Aliona Hlazkova, the regional coordinator, shares her thoughts about this year’s Docudays UA in Kremenchuk.

We wait for the festival for the whole year, and it flies by so quickly in a week. If we try to summarize, in this festival week we:

- as a team of 8 people

- organized 51 film screenings with discussions

- in 4 cities (Kremenchuk, Svitlovodsk, Horishni Plavni, Oleksandria) and 1 village (Onufriyivka)

- at 23 locations

- 11 schools, 5 libraries, 3 alternative youth and creative spaces, a study camp, a restaurant, a house of culture, an educational penitentiary facility

- for more than 1000 viewers

In addition, the festival program included three exhibitions: Still Coming Back to Crimea, about the history of Crimean Tatars and deportation; The Expanse, about the impact of plastics on our environment and our everyday life; Ninjas Against Hate, with posters about opposing hate speech online and offline.

Everybody will remember the discussions of the screened films with their directors. Thanks to informational technology, we managed to contact the authors of several films on Skype. The creative space of Svitlovodsk, our partners from a neighboring town, and their audience were very lucky. They had a chance to talk to Anastasia Maksymchuk, the director of the film Refuge, and Yulia Kochetova-Nabozhniak, the director of See You Later. At the Erudite study and health camp, the audience discussed the film Diary with the author Oleksandra Chupryna.

It was very interesting to observe different reactions of people, who often represented different generations, to the same films. Of our total 50 screenings, we picked the main ones: Alfredo, Home Games, Jamala’s Struggle and Meanwhile.

It’s impossible not to mention our Live Library. Finally, police officers came to us! Traditionally, we also had mothers who support their LGBT children, from the parents’ movement TERGO. We decided to remind our community of the problems of the internally displaced people. For the first time, you could read the books A Roma, A Crimean Tatar and A Person who Has Overcome Dependence in our library.

The festival in the Kremenchuk Space of Ideas was closed with another film on a Crimean topic, The Trial: The State of Russia vs. Oleh Sentsov. The audience discussed the politics in Russia, wondered about the spinelessness and weakness of its opposition, ridiculed the nonsensical charges. And, of course, they thought about how they could help the Ukrainian political prisoners in Crimea.

It is hard to say that the ending was optimistic, because the situation with human rights is always difficult, and people often prefer simple answers and clear solutions. It is said that the topic is unpopular, the government and the community do not pay enough attention to the festival events, they do not want to learn more about human rights and their protection. But we are inspired by our caring audience, good films, and the confidence that we are doing a socially useful thing. Is it really true? We think about it every year.

Photos: Olesia Musiyenko