The OKO film festival has a mission - to show Bulgarians what is happening in Ukraine

I fear that when the war is over, the truth will be covered up, like the crimes committed during the Soviet era, says the founder of the festival

published on 11/8/24 6:20 PM

Author: Ioan Kolev

Тетяна Станева

Photo: FB /Tetiana Staneva

Over 100 films and various discussions on current issues await those who seek a first-hand account of events in Ukraine at the fifth edition of ОКО - International Ethnographic Film Festival. For the first time, the festival is a Ukrainian-Bulgarian event. It runs from 8 to 15 November.

"Through our festival we hope to continue to build a bridge between Ukraine and Bulgaria - said its founder, Bessarabian-Bulgarian Tetiana Staneva, in an interview with Radio Bulgaria. I think the mission is to get to know each other. Because when is someone afraid of something? The simple answer is: when they don't understand it.

After the war broke out and I started travelling to Bulgaria, I talked to ordinary people - taxi drivers, shopkeepers and people in the street.

I found that they knew absolutely nothing about us. They still don't distinguish between Ukraine and Russia, they think Ukraine is the Soviet Union and Ukrainian Bulgarians are Russians. Everyone can tell by our accent that we are not from Sofia, but I still think that our origin is our advantage. We have struggled all our lives to prove to Bulgaria that we are Bulgarians. Then I realised that we need to answer these questions - who are we and why are we at war? That's why I think our festival has an educational mission.

Every day Tetiana Staneva receives messages from people who want to know details about the screenings. One asked her to recommend films in which war is not the main theme. She notes that such films will be shown, but admits:

"We can't bury our heads in the sand like ostriches and expect the war to end - it doesn't work that way. Here you can turn off the TV or skip the cinema and forget about the war. But for us, it never stops. It will end, eventually. But then I fear that the truth of what happened will be buried again. You know how they say that "history is written by the victors".

The Bessarabian-Bulgarian gives an example:

"For 70 years we were part of an absolute information bubble under the Soviet Union. All the crimes of communism were a closed book to us. But the Union collapsed and we began to research our own history, to open the archives and learn what had happened. The older people were extremely frightened and preferred not to talk about the war or the famine for fear of repression in prisons, Siberia or elsewhere.

Our programme includes three films in which a single person defies the system. One, called "Diagnosis Dissent", focuses on the forced confinement of dissidents in psychiatric hospitals.

We are also showing "Slovo House", which is about our Red Renaissance, as we call it. It is about our poets and writers from the 1930s who wrote about Ukraine and wanted to tell us the truth about the famine (Holodomor), but were banned. The building where these writers lived and worked turned out to be a trap, which the Soviet Union first offered them as a place to work with certain privileges, and then they started killing them one by one.

We have a film, "Oxygen Station", about the leader of the Crimean Tatars, who was also oppressed. It is his autobiographical story.

The film "War Letters", written and directed by Tetiana Staneva herself, will also be screened.

The discussions that will be part of the festival's accompanying programme deserve no less attention than the films:

"One is dedicated to cinema and propaganda, the other to the decommunisation currently taking place in Ukraine and why it is happening so slowly in Bulgaria. We will also discuss what is the Bulgarian heritage of our diaspora and how to preserve it in times of war. We will try to reconstruct the portraits, the personalities of Hristo Botev and Taras Shevchenko, to understand why their testaments are so relevant to both nations today".

We spoke to Tetiana Staneva about the US election, Donald Trump's victory and its impact on the war between Russia and Ukraine. She says it is too early to tell what role the new president will play in the conflict between the two states.

"There are two different views. On the one hand, Trump does not seem to know history or who Putin is. This is populism, while in fact, he knows how to act. On the other hand, it is possible that he has good relations with Russia and can stop the war, but it will be at our expense. Obviously, the situation in our country is very much dependent on what happens in the US and the Western world, because without that help we will not survive.

Photos: Facebook /okofilmfest, Facebook /Tetiana Staneva

Translated and posted in English by E. Radkova

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