The 21st Travelling Docudays UA opened on October 8 in Boryspil. The theme of this year’s festival is “10 Years of the Three-Days War that Lasts for Three Centuries.” For eight years now, the V. Chornovil Boryspil Public Library opens its doors for local fans of documentary cinema who have been looking forward to the festival. The first film that the audience watched in Boryspil, The Kyiv Files, offers to explore complicated pages of the Soviet period in the history of Ukraine and uncover stories hidden behind the espionage materials of Soviet special services.

The first film presented, The Kyiv Files, addresses the topic of historical research. Dutch filmmaker Walter Stokman started working on the film in 2018, when Ukraine first opened access to the KGB archives. The film features a peculiar ambient aesthetic and landscape filming with the use of drones, which has become impossible with the outbreak of the full-scale war.

The three protagonists whose stories are in the focus of the film familiarize themselves with the materials that indicate they’ve been spied on more than 50 years ago. How does it feel to hold a copy of your personal life, see secretly taken photos, and listen to your intercepted conversation from the past? The director captures live emotions of people involved in the archive cases. Some of the materials in those documents are fake – these are fantasies and unproven assumptions of special agents of the Soviet secret services. For example, the case of the “courtesan,” a French woman who was suspected of being a foreign agent. In reality, we see a story of passion and, perhaps, love between a recruited student and a young girl, and the bewilderment of the elderly woman whose personal life was tampered with by Soviet agents.

Particularly valuable is the story of surveillance of the dissident family of Oksen Lisovyi, the current Minister of Education and Science. His mother appears in the case as “Quiet” because she always behaves calmly and intelligently during interrogations. She and her daughter recall those difficult times and discover their family's archival file with interest.

The 21st Travelling Docudays UA in Boryspil

Particularly interesting is the interview with a former KGB officer who tells us how the methods of influencing citizens have changed over the decades. In his commentary to the filmmaker, the man shares his thoughts on “ethnopsychology” and the ways Ukrainians were influenced by the experience of surveillance, denunciation of each other, mass recruitment, and, consequently, the reluctance to speak and open up to others. At the same time, the youngest generation will be free from this experience. 

Eduard Andryushchenko, historian, journalist, and author of the book The KGB Archives: Non-Fictional Stories, attended the premiere of the film The Kyiv Files. He told about his contribution to the film and difficulties with finding characters who would agree to appear in the film and tell their stories. Unfortunately, the most high-profile cases and files related to high-ranking officials were deliberately destroyed without a trace. The historian also shared his interesting findings from the archives and told about the work on his next book. 

The festival audience was excited by the film and the conversation with the historian. “I learned a lot of new things no-one told us at school during history lessons,” one of the viewers said. “It is really valuable to have the opportunity to discover new pages of our history,” another viewer confessed during the discussion of the film. 

Author of the material: Olena Shkrebtiyenko, moderator of the Travelling Docudays UA events in Boryspil

The 21st Travelling Docudays UA is supported by the Embassy of Sweden in Ukraine, the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Ukraine, and International Media Support. The opinions, conclusions or recommendations do not necessarily reflect the views of respective governments or charitable organizations of these countries. The author(s) of this publication are solely responsible for its content.

NGO Docudays is a non-profit public organization that implements cultural and educational projects at the intersection of cinema and human rights in Ukraine and abroad. Among them are: The Docudays UA International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival and the Docudays UA Travelling International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival, the Docudays UA DOCU/CLUB Network of Human Rights Media Education Film Clubs, the human rights program RIGHTS NOW! the DOCUSPACE online cinema, the DOCU/PRO Ukrainian film industry development platform and the DOCU/CLASS documentary workshop, as well as the Docudays UA DOCU/SYNTHESIS interdisciplinary art program and the War Archive, launched in cooperation with the INFOSCOPE initiative.

Media partners of the 21st Docudays UA Travelling Festival: Vgoru Media Platform, GURT Resource Center.