Maryna Vroda: “Stepne is a feeling”

The filmmaker will talk with the audience attending the presentation of the film this evening at 7.15 p.m., at the Sala Fundos

She has just won the Best Director Award and the Critics’ Prize at Locarno, and before appearing before her audience Maryna Vroda did so before the Seminci itself, with whom she shared her vision of the film. “Stepne is a feeling”, said the director of the film, born from the “feeling that she had lost a country”, Ukraine, and that has made her “return home”. The film, in the Meeting Point section, will have its first screening on the opening day of the 68th Film Week, at 7.15 p.m., in the Sala Fundos.

Un pueblo desaparecido con la guerra (A village disappeared with the war) is the title of this story, for which she won the award for best director and the critics’ prize at Locarno, and responds to “a feeling of social catastrophe” that she herself felt as an artist, as a person and as a Ukrainian. And, despite this, she assures that her first film has nothing to do with war, but rather explores “the relationship between people, the world and time; the relationship with the world”, in short.

His search for the essence of Ukrainian identity led Vroda to give a voice to the elders of the place where Stepne was filmed and talk about “the values of life”; the film crew entered their homes, which were wide open to them, met “as a family” and the protagonists of the stories “opened up at the time of filming for the first time”.

The testimonies of the past establish an inevitable parallelism with the present: what is happening now in Ukraine is “a problem that was born a hundred years ago”, said the filmmaker to vindicate the memory and criticize the international inaction in the situation in her country. “Nobody listens”, she said in an interview for Canal Seminci, “we have lost the belief that politics can bring us improvements”.