Genocide Revealed

Just like Pandora’s Box, there’s no going back when the lid opens and dark secrets are let loose. Genocide Revealed, a 75 minute documentary produced, directed and edited by award-winning Montreal filmmaker, Yurij Luhovy, uncovers layers of planning and malicious intent by Stalin and his inner circle to unleash Communist terror and national repression in Ukraine by creating an artificial famine in 1932-33, the Holodomor. The film has won eleven international film festival awards.

While there are several outstanding films recently made and released on the subjec, Mr. Luhovy’s intent is to bring this dark chapter of civilization’s history to mainstream audiences with directing skill and undaunted tenacity. He does this through extensive research that is period specific, effective script writing that combines eyewitness accounts with academic interpretations and searing visuals burned into memories long after the last frame of the archival footage ends: scrawled writing on a boarded up village window announcing “Vsi Pomerly,” “All Died.”

Never before seen archival material– film footage, photos and documents –are meticulously recorded and presented. Since Harvest of Despair, a film Mr. Luhovy co-directed that was released in 1983, more unfathomable information was unearthed and the monumental extent of this inhumane atrocity unfolded. After Ukraine’s independence in 1992, the classified archives were available for academic reviews. This enabled the filmmaker to gain access to film archives in Kyiv. Along with his wife, Zoriana Hrycenko, producer, and through the help of historian-researcher Nina Lapchynska and consultant Jaroslav Rozumnyj, Mr. Luhovy put together his film crew, including daughter Adriana, principal cinematograper, and son, Roman, music composer and sound mix, and headed out into the regions where the survivors of the Holodomor remain.

Insighful and mind boggling, the heart wrenching testimonials of these survivors; comments by historians, writers, and poets; rare footage of the Soviet period used for propaganda purposes; identification of Stalin’s inner circle architects of murder as well as recounting how local villagers – recruited as thugs– were able to inflict such brutality on their fellow Ukrainians, captures the broad scope of genocidal policies against the Ukrainian nation and its people.

While subtitles work in foreign language documentaries so that non-Ukrainian speakers can hear the expression in the voices of witnesses, the filmmaker found ways that allow for hearing the Ukrainian language original under the narration and voice-over translations. It works. The narrator, Academy Award winner Graham Green, is an Oneida, born on Six Nations Reserve, Ohsweken, Ontario Canada who has worked on stage, film and television productions in Canada, England and the United States. Best known for his nomination as Kicking Bird in Dances With Wolves (1990), he won an Earle Grey Award for Lifetime Achievement (2004) at Gemini Awards, the Canadian television broadcasting industry. Voiceovers by Lubomir Mykytiuk. a Ukrainian Canadian with a slew of film and television credits, who has won accolades in the Canadian broadcasting industry and Jill Hennessy originally from Edmonton, Alberta Canada. Ms. Hennessy is well known in film and television especially her award-winning work as star of Crossing Jordan (2001-2007) and Law and Order (1993-1996). She is also a singer-songwriter who recently composed a song dedicated to her Ukrainian maternal grandmother.

Yurij Luhovy, a member of the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television, has worked for over 35 years on award-winning documentaries for the CBC, the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) and many independent productions. A multi award-winning filmmaker, he has produced, directed and edited many independent, compelling films, including Okradena Zemlya, the Ukrainian version of Genocide Revealed; Bereza Kartuzka (2007) a documentary on the internment of Ukrainians during the Polish occupation of Western Ukraine; The Tree That Remembers, (2001) Freedom Had A Price, (1994) documentary, on Canada’s first internment operations 1914-1920. For more information on future screenings of Genocide Revealed, go to www.yluhovy.com