In Eastern Europe at the end of World War II, the horrors of the Nazis were often replaced by those of the Soviet Union. Olia Ilkiv, a native of Lviv, knows that fact all too well. Her husband joined the 'Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) to hide in the woods and fight the Soviets, while she, a mother of two, became a clandestine operative for the women’s network, gathering and passing information, helping shelter the men, and, in general, taking risks every bit as dangerous as the men. Like many female operatives, she was captured by the KGB, tortured, and sent to some remote hell of a political prison with a 20-something-year sentence. As Soviet regimes changed, she was occasionally given the option of apologizing in order to be let out or writing a letter of clemency. By the 1960s, Ilkiv, who hadn’t seen her children since her capture and only somewhat knew where they might be, decided to write such a letter. It began with an utterly defiant first line: “I was born on a piece of land that was on fire, and I had to burn with it.”
Ilkiv’s is one of three fascinating lives presented in Three Stories of Galicia, a documentary making its U.S. debut this week in Baltimore and Washington, D.C. Produced, directed, and edited by the D.C.-based filmmaking team of Olha Onyshko (originally from the Ukraine) and Sarah Farhat (originally from Lebanon, who now lives in the D.C. area), Galicia tells the story of a region of Eastern Europe whose rich cultural history—and the ethnic cleansing that struck it after WWII—remains largely unknown, in both the East and the West.
Galicia is the name of a Ukrainian region in western Ukraine, with the Carpathian Mountains forming a natural border to the south. At the beginning of the 20th century, it was a multicultural pocket where three major groups, among others, lived peacefully side by side: Roman Catholic Poles, Jews, and the 'Ukrainian Orthodox. The arrival of the Nazis brought their inhumanity to the region, and postwar turmoil sparked a whole different variety of ethnic conflicts—the now all too familiar sort that turns neighbor against neighbor, boyhood friends into adult enemies—which have remained untold in official histories and often largely unspoken by the people who survived it.
DVD "THREE STORIES OF GALICIA" REQUIRE ALL REGION DVD PLAYER.
DOLBY DIGITAL : PAL 4:3
COLOR
FULL SCREEN
RUNNING TIME : 90 Min.
LANGUAGE : UKRAINIAN, RUSSIAN, POLISH, ENGLISH
2013 ROSTOK RECORDS
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