Contact Studio of the National Filmmakers' Union of Ukraine

Ukrainian cameraman Sasha Shumovich was a shining light in Ukrainian national cinema, but in 1996 he was tragically shot and killed. During his short life he worked with Roman Balayan, Yuri Illenko and, above all, with Sergii Masloboishchykov. In honour of his memory, the director made this sensitive documentary that serves both as a farewell and a declaration of love.

It turns out that Andrei Tarkovsky’s great-grandfather and Ivan Tobilevych (Karpenko-Karyi) have family ties. In this film, Vadym Skurativskyi, a curious Ukrainian cultural historian, recounts this unexpected phenomenon, taking us to the tailend of the 19th century. Sergii Masloboishchykov recreates photographs of relatives and imposes them with the films of Tarkovsky.

Woland from Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, the guide at the Bulgakov Museum, little Mikhail on his own, and his nanny, united in a single narrative in this experimental documentary inspired by the biography of the writer. To approach this mysterious oeuvre the film combines the uncombinable. Re-enactments at Bulgakov’s house in the Podil neighbourhood are met with excerpts from films by Griffith, Lubitsch and Duvivier. The heady mix of storytelling techniques makes this film a hypnotising dream, confounding like the work of the writer himself.

“True art is the strength of its versatility and incompleteness,” says Daniel Lider, a great stage artist, teacher and citizen of Kyiv, the place where his art could express itself most freely. Mixing archive footage of Lider’s creative reflections with biographical facts narrated by his wife, the filmmaker keeps the film concise, bringing its cinematic form closer to the protagonist’s philosophy, as experimental as the television production of the 1+1 TV channel could allow.