29/11/2024 - Stanislav Gurenko and Andrii Alferov’s movie is a stylishly captivating memoir about activists in Soviet Ukraine, which is unfortunately hard to understand for those not familiar with that period

Oleksandr Pryščepa and Viktorija Romaško in Dissident

Whilst language might, first and foremost, be a vehicle for cultural practices, over and above a code of communication, it’s also clear that it’s the basic embodiment of a national community’s identity, and that’s why we speak of oppression when a group is forced to use a language which isn’t their own mother tongue. This is what happened in the Soviet Union, which banned the Ukrainian language and imposed the use of Russian, not least in schools. The reappropriation of language as a symbolic stand against invasion - which has turned into full-scale war in the present-day - is central to Dissident, a film directed by Stanislav Gurenko and Andrii Alferov which world premiered in competition within the Turin Film Festival.

Dissident is akin to a memoir, as explained by the text accompanying the film’s opening images, on one of the director’s aunts (Gurenko’s, we imagine), who was an activist in Soviet Ukraine’s dissident movement and who survived prison and “punitive medicine”. The movie collects the memories of those within her circle who never stopped being dissidents, not even in the early Nineties. In 1968, the so-called “thaw” - when Nikita Krusciov attempted internal democratisation following Stalin’s death - was over; a period of relief, we hear an off-camera voice explain over archive footage of millions of political prisoners being released from camps and 65,000 members of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army being guaranteed amnesty. The new dissident movement found its heroes among the human rights activists who advocated free development of the Ukrainian language and culture, as well as the right to their own state and religion, which had both been banned in 1946. The Greek-Catholic Church priests who had managed to escape prison simply carried on giving mass in secret, as seen in the film.

Divided into four chapters, Dissident opens with a man who sets fire to himself out of protest, just like Jan Palach and Jan Zajíc in Prague in 1969. A married couple are the film’s protagonists (Oleksandr Pryščepa and Viktorija Romaško): she works in a dressmaker’s shop, he’s a former Ukrainian army soldier who has just been released from a prison camp and who now works in a factory as a dissident under surveillance by political police agents. An array of characters gravitate around the couple, coming in and out of the story without any real logic or chronology: there’s a priest, a writer, various intellectuals, dissidents and government spies, and a young woman who writes songs.

The mise en scene style is captivating and very current, paying tribute to Eastern European cinema and presumably born out of a fusion between the two authors’ experiences. Gurenko studied film in Los Angeles, he’s directed countless music videos and adverts, and in 2016 he made a documentary about a group of bikers. In Dissident, he teams up with director of photography Oleksandr Bojko to create the oppressive and angst-inducing atmosphere which is so typical of films where people opposing regimes are hunted down, even though the movie is essentially composed of lengthy dialogue edited by Maksim Miklin (together with the two directors) combined with archive footage. There’s a continuity between the latter and the “period” colour of the film’s photography, with the camera geometrically framing the characters against a backdrop of socialist architecture consisting of triangular flights of stairs, factories with large windows, and stained-glass windows depicting workers. Alferov, for his part, is a film critic and exhibition curator par excellence, who also penned the screenplay for Dissident alongside Oleksandr Kačan and Vladislav Micovśkij. This explains the movie’s markedly authorial and intellectual stamp and, unfortunately, over and above a not-so-hidden j’accuse directed towards Vladimir Putin, the difficulties viewers will have understanding the film’s dialogue if they’re not overly familiar with the history of Soviet Ukraine or with real-life figures such as Pavlo Skoropadskyi, Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky, Petro Shelest, around whom the movie’s discussions revolve.

Dissident was produced by Ukraine’s Joyfilms in co-production with Odessa Film Studio and AR Content.

(Translated from Italian)