A Conversation With Svitlana Lishchynska (A BIT OF A STRANGER)

“I am afraid for the future of Ukraine only if Russia gets what it wants and shows the effectiveness of its system“ – Svitlana Lishchynska on A Bit of A Stranger. Ukrainian filmmaker Svitlana Lishchynska has been “a bit of a stranger” all her life. Growing up in Russian-speaking Mariupol under the Soviet regime, she became a dutiful mother there, but then took off to Kyiv in pursuit of a career in the newly independent Ukraine – leaving her young daughter in the care of her own mom back home. And now her adult daughter has her own young daughter, and is raising her with the Russian values (including support for its leader) she herself imbibed from living in the border town. If not directly from her skeptical if not cynical grandmother, whose own family ended up in Mariupol as a result of having been forcibly dispossessed by the Soviets. In other words, the intergenerational dynamics are complicated between these three very different women to say the least. And then came the full-scale invasion, which forced a reckoning with national identity and the Russian-colonized mindset for them all. Just after the film’s Berlinale debut I caught up with the director and screenwriter, who is also a veteran of the entertainment tv industry, to learn all about turning the camera on family, and grappling with existential questions in the middle of a war. A Bit of A Stranger most recently screened in the International Competition and In Focus: Ukraine programs at the Verzió International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival (November 6-13).

To read my interview visit Hammer to Nail.