Plaque honoring Serhii Bondarchuk unveiled in Kyiv
A plaque dedicated to the outstanding Ukrainian actor and film director Serhii Bondarchuk was unveiled on the wall of the Zhovten Cinema in honor of his 87th birth anniversary.
The Zhovten staff had formally requested Kyiv City Hall to name the square in front of the movie theater after this famous director, and one year ago the authorities gave a positive answer. This happened during the Molodist Film Festival in Kyiv, when President Viktor Yushchenko conferred an award on the Bondarchuk family for its contributions to the development of cinema. During the festival the director’s widow Iryna Skobtseva and son Fedir Bondarchuk attended a soiree at the Zhovten Cinema, dedicated to Serhii Bondarchuk and the 50th anniversary of the release of Tymofii Levchuk’s film Ivan Franko.
However, the city authorities never followed up on their decision. Many things have changed since this square, graced with a copy of a statue by the famous Russian sculptor Ivan Shadr, was named Krasnaia Presnia 25 years ago. The statue has since been relocated and new construction will go up in the area. The official name of the square was also renamed. It would seem reasonable to immortalize the square with Bondarchuk’s name and leave it as a park area.
Theater director Liudmyla Gordeladze, People’s Artist of Ukraine Oleksandr Bystrushkin, and the artistic director of the Molodist Film Festival, Andrii Khalpakhchi, believe that unveiling the commemorative plaque is a step that will help change the situation. As Bystrushkin told The Day, “I think that, first of all, the square should be named after Bondarchuk. This issue should not be pegged to the elections. This should have been done several years ago, when we found a lot of documents to further the claim to immortalize Serhii Bondarchuk’s memory.”
According to Gordeladze, the Zhovten Cinema has repeatedly screened Bondarchuk’s films, and during his lifetime the director often attended screenings at this movie theater. His widow also attended retrospective screenings of her husband’s film War and Peace and other events. Each time she would express the wish that the memory of Bondarchuk, an ethnic Ukrainian, who made a sizable contribution to Ukrainian cinematography, be immortalized in this place.
Gordeladze said: “We’ve been pressing this case because the Zhovten is Kyiv’s oldest movie theater, which has shown Bondarchuk’s entire oeuvre. Bondarchuk also premiered his films They Fought for the Fatherland and War and Peace here. I personally invited Bondarchuk to Kyiv in 1986, the ‘black’ period of his life, when his movie Boris Godunov flopped at the Cannes Film Festival after the director was unjustifiably humiliated by the Union of Film Makers of the USSR. At the time, Kyiv was hosting celebrations of the 30th anniversary of the film Ivan Franko, and he came over, much to everybody’s joy. The square-renaming saga came to a head in 2006, when it was suggested that a street be named after Bondarchuk, but we insisted that the name of our great fellow countryman be given to the square in front of the theater. Only now have the authorities notified us of a positive decision, and I hope it is carried out. I think the unveiling of the plaque is a major step in this direction.”
“We still haven’t rejected the Soviet-era tradition of forgetting about Ukrainian-born people,” Khalpakhchi says. “Serhii Bondarchuk was not only born in Ukraine: he played brilliant roles in Ukrainian films and brought glory to our cinematic art. He never forgot our language and made sure that his family also spoke it. There are a lot of commemorative plaques to heroes, left over from Soviet times, and they are of little consequence to the present-day generation. Why not then immortalize those who are really important for us, Ukrainians, who were raised on Ukrainian soil? I don’t know any place better in Kyiv than the Zhovten Cinema to honor the memory of Serhii Bondarchuk.”
