“Stories That Need to Be Told”: Elwira Niewiera and Piotr Rosołowski on Ukrainian Documentary The Hamlet Syndrome

One of the more unusual projects to play this year’s DOC NYC (also concurrently screening at IDFA in the Best of Fests section), Elwira Niewiera and Piotr Rosołowski’s The Hamlet Syndrome follows five young men and women as they develop an experimental stage piece based on Shakespeare’s tragedy — as well as their own. The quintet questioning “to be or not to be” are all Ukrainians who have been engaged, to varying degrees, in the war Russia launched back in 2014. (This theater-as-therapy session even predated Putin’s full-scale invasion by several months.) Soldiers Slavik and Katya, along with paramedic Roman, all saw direct conflict. Meanwhile, Rodion, a stylist from Donbas, and Oxana, who’s conflicted about her acting opportunities abroad, bear their own individual psychological scars. Indeed, the latter two also seem to be battling personal wars internally. Having fled his homophobic hometown, Rodion now finds himself increasingly fed up with cosmopolitan liberals, who collectively celebrate the queer community as heroes. “Make this a country where we don’t have to be heroes!” he rages in one powerful monologue. Likewise, Oxana seems resentful of skin-deep groupthink, suffocated by the nationalism that war inevitably inspires. “There is no freedom, only responsibility,” she laments. Whose definition of freedom are these patriotic players actually fighting for? To learn all about shooting an existential drama in the middle of a hot war, Filmmaker reached out to the Polish directing duo (2017’s The Prince and the Dybbuk, 2014’s Domino Effect) — one of whom was selected for the Creative Culture Artist-in-Residence at the Jacob Burns Film Center — just prior to their film’s November 12 DOC NYC (and IDFA) debut.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.