Ukraine
Chernobyl, Sky Atlantic review - a glimpse of ArmageddonWednesday, 08 May 2019
“I take it the safety test was a failure,” remarked Viktor Bryukhanov, director of Ukraine’s Chernobyl nuclear power station. You could say that again. The catastrophic explosions at the Vladimir I Lenin plant on 26 April 1986, caused by a safety... Read more... |
Donbass review - war stories from the Ukrainian frontSaturday, 27 April 2019
The latest from the prolific Sergei Loznitsa, Donbass is a bad-dream journey into the conflict that’s been waging in Eastern Ukraine since 2014, barely noticed beyond its immediate region. The titular break-away region, also known as “Novorossiya” (... Read more... |
Counting Sheep, The Vaults review - visceral recreation of an uprisingThursday, 31 January 2019
Is there a connection between revolution and theatre? The answer has to be yes – a visceral one. The supremacy of symbols, the collective strength of a crowd, a sense that some kind of pressure valve is being released to challenge the dominant... Read more... |
theartsdesk at the Ravenna Festival - Italians, Ukrainians and an American promote peaceSaturday, 21 July 2018
Everything is political in the world's current turbulent freefall. The aim of Riccardo Muti's "Roads of Friendship" series, taking the young players of his Luigi Cherubini Youth Orchestra to cities from Sarajevo in 1997 to Moscow in 2000 and Tehran... Read more... |
Bruno Maçães: The Dawn of Eurasia review - middle of nowhereSunday, 21 January 2018
Part travelogue and part broad analysis of the current and future challenges facing the EU, the premise of Bruno Maçães’s new book The Dawn of Eurasia is to “use travel to provide an injection of reality of political, economic and historical... Read more... |
'I come from there': how the Royal Court brought home plays from Ukraine, Chile and SyriaWednesday, 11 October 2017
The autumn season of plays at the Royal Court leads with international work. B by Guillermo Calderón (from Chile), Bad Roads by Natal'ya Vorozhbit (from Ukraine) and Goats by Liwaa Yazji (from Syria) have a long history with our international... Read more... |
Anne Applebaum: Red Famine review - hope around a heart of darknessSunday, 17 September 2017
Hands both sensitive and surgical are needed to guide a reader into the heart of the 20th century’s second biggest genocide and out again. Anne Applebaum is the right person for a queasy and difficult task, never turning away from the horrifying... Read more... |
DVD: DancerTuesday, 25 April 2017
For decades, but especially since the turn of the millennium, the arts have fretted over how to appeal to a younger audience. For ballet, this has meant playing down the notion of “men in tights” in favour of “dancers train harder than footballers... Read more... |
Almost HolyFriday, 19 August 2016
Tough love doesn’t get much tougher. Ukrainian priest Gennadiy Mokhnenko has spent two decades trying to keep children off the streets, and away from drugs, in his hometown Mariupol, using methods that elsewhere in the world would count as... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Odessa: Films and post-truth in the new UkraineThursday, 04 August 2016
With Ukraine embroiled in conflict and a currency crisis the Odessa International Film Festival does not have the budget to bring in big stars. In any case, most of those pampered A-listers would have been nervous to go to what they or their... Read more... |
The Border, Channel 4Wednesday, 22 June 2016
Have psychologists analysed whether subtitles increase our enjoyment of TV drama, perhaps lending it an extra tincture of the exotic? They do no harm at all to this new Polish drama about border guards protecting the frontier between Poland and... Read more... |
DVD: Battle for SevastopolFriday, 27 May 2016
The latest in a long tradition of Russian Second World War films, Sergei Mokritsky’s Battle for Sevastopol itself emerged out of conflict. Initiated as a "status" joint project between Russia and Ukraine well before relations between those two... Read more... |
