Ukraine
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... |
Jazz Central - London... or Odessa?Friday, 13 November 2015
For an art form that has been quite often written off over the last half century, Jazz seems in extraordinarily rude health. Today sees the opening of the biggest ever EFG London Jazz Festival featuring scores of venues and hundreds of groups... Read more... |
Don Juan, Lesya Ukrainka Theatre, St James TheatreFriday, 18 September 2015
Whose Don Juan – progenitor Tirso de Molina’s, Molière’s or Pushkin’s? None of the above. Unless you have some knowledge of Ukrainian culture, you won’t have heard of Lesya Ukrainka, born Larysa Petrivna Kosach-Kvitka in 1871 to a proudly... Read more... |
DVD: The TribeTuesday, 15 September 2015
Although The Tribe is disquieting, seeing it at home rather than experiencing the full immersion of a cinema screening raises questions of what gives it its impact. theartsdesk’s review coinciding with the theatrical release pinpointed what makes... Read more... |
Prom 11: Fiddler on the Roof, Grange Park OperaSunday, 26 July 2015
Stop miking Bryn Terfel. Stop over-miking musicals; the show voices in a hybrid cast don’t need much. Too much ruined English National Opera’s recent Sweeney Todd, and in this Proms adaptation of Grange Park Opera’s summer crowd-pleaser it sent the... Read more... |
The TribeWednesday, 13 May 2015
In The Tribe, his feature debut, Ukrainian director Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy has created something totally unexpected, and viscerally powerful to boot. This dark tale of life among inmates of a Kyiv institution for the deaf avoids spoken language... Read more... |
MaidanTuesday, 17 February 2015
I went into watching Sergei Loznitsa’s documentary Maidan with the highest hopes, and came out, more than two hours later, cold. For a film about a successful national liberation movement, that’s something of a paradox.It’s titled, of course, after... Read more... |
Black SeaWednesday, 03 December 2014
Despite the presence of Jude Law as a disillusioned old underseadog, the real star of Black Sea is the 50-year-old Russian submarine on which most of the action takes place. Now called Black Widow, the vessel lives on the river Medway near Rochester... Read more... |
