Docudays UA was welcomed by its traditional partner, the Ternopil Regional Universal Science Library. It hosted a screening and discussion of one of this year’s programme hits, the film Minding the Gap by Bing Liu. The film is the young director’s debut in documentary cinema. This year, it was nominated for the Academy  Awards as the best nonfiction film.

“This is not just a film, this is an actual masterpiece of cinema. It may be viewed as another, and the best, argument against the imperfect division of cinema genres into fiction and documentary films. Because documentaries can also be very artistic,” believes Oleksandr Stepanenko, the coordinator of the Travelling Docudays UA in Ternopil Region.

The author focuses on the problem of domestic violence and the factors that cause it. The disposable approach is transferred from the world of things to the world of human relationships. Unemployment, poverty, alcohol, lewdness and the generally low cultural level entrench the tradition of violence in the social life.

The filmmaker uses the example of his own and his friends’ families to prove that violence as a “means of education” does not work. The author and his characters do not resort to intrusive moralizing. They experience and articulate their pain, frustration and hope for forgiveness. And with this, they prove that children must be taught with our own example, care, attention, love and patience.

The film moved the library’s audience deeply. Its protagonists are “imperfect” people who actually make many mistakes and unjustified actions in their life. But they all evoke the audience’s sympathy and empathy.

The next meeting at the Regional Library will take place on December 10. There will be a screening of the film Diviners by Roman Bordun. This story is a kaleidoscope, which features all of us: the righteous, the merciless, the funny, the naïve, the honest. Our reality is multi-layered, unvarnished, deprived of unambiguous interpretations of good and evil, humanity and cruelty, charity and indifference.