“Bitter Harvest,” the first major movie about the genocidal artificial famine engineered by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin in the 1930s, comes to cinemas in Ukraine and the U.S. in February 2017.
“Bitter Harvest” tells the story of two villagers, Yuri and Natalka – lovers, whose peaceful life is destroyed by the Soviet authorities, and who battle to survive the artificial famine, known in Ukraine as the Holodomor.
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In times when a person could go to jail just for stealing a single ear of corn, Yuri becomes a key figure in the resistance against the Soviet oppressors.
The film shows how Ukrainian villagers were forced to give their whole harvest to the Soviet authorities, being left with no food at all. Those who kept any food were imprisoned or exiled to Siberia. People were also banned from leaving the rural areas so they couldn’t escape the famine.
The estimated number of people in Ukraine who starved to death in 1932-1933 varies from 2 million to 10 million.
Most Ukrainian historians believe that the Holodomor was Stalin’s attempt to strangle Ukraine’s nationalist movement and anti-Soviet protests by villagers.
Despite taking the lives of millions of people, the famine was kept secret by the Soviet authorities and only came to light after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
“This would mean the death of millions,” a Soviet official says in the movie trailer, planning the starvation.
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“Who in the world will know?” Stalin replies.
The Ukrainian parliament declared the Holodomor an act of genocide in 2003. The same year, the United Nations issued a declaration that the Holodomor was a Ukrainian national tragedy caused by the totalitarian regime of the Soviet Union.
The film has an impressive cast: Yuri, a descendant of Ukrainian Cossacks, is played by British actor Max Irons, most famous for his role in “The Host,” a 2013 adaptation of a novel by Stephenie Meyer. His love interest Natalka is played by Samantha Barks, known for her role as Éponine in the film version of the musical “Les Miserables.”
The film also stars Canadian actor Barry Pepper, famous for playing the role of Daniel Jackson in “Saving Private Ryan” and prison guard Dean Stanton in “The Green Mile.”
The screenplay was written by Canadian-born writer Richard Bachynsky-Hoover, while director George Mendeluk adapted the story for filming. Both Bachynsky-Hoover and Mendeluk are descendants of the Holodomor survivors.
“I grew up with my mother describing how she and her family survived the terror of the Holodomor, at a time when the world looked the other way,” Mendeluk is quoted as saying on the film’s official website, www.bitterharvestfilm.com.
“As you can see from today’s media, Stalin’s long shadow still affects Ukraine, but our story is essentially one of love triumphing over all that life throws at it,” he said.
Most of the story was filmed in Pyrohiv, a historical park of just 10 kilometers from Kyiv, in the autumn of 2013, during the rule of ex-president Victor Yanukovych. The crew didn’t go public about the filming, because Yanukovych didn’t recognize the Holodomor as an act of genocide. The last scenes of “Bitter Harvest” were shot just a few days after Yanukovych fled the country in February of 2014.
The film was first screened at the American Film Market festival for film producers in Santa Monica, United States on Nov. 9, 2015. Since then the film has been screened at the Berlinale and Cannes Film Festival.
“It truly opens up (Western people’s) eyes to what is happening in Ukraine today, and I think people are astonished that we’re not widely taught this piece of history,” the producer of “Bitter Harvest,” Ian Ihnatowycz, was quoted as saying on www.bitterharvestfilm.com.
The film will be released in the United States on Feb. 24, 2017, and in Ukraine on Feb. 23, 2017.
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