"A Family's Struggle In Stalin's Man-Made Famine"
"Famine-33" Film Review by Stephen Holden
The New York Times, December 15, 1993

"The indelible images of human suffering that permeate Oles Yanchuk's film "Famine-33" are memorable precisely because they are so far removed in tone from the raucous, shoot-'em-up violence and hysteria of Hollywood movies. In this drama of a Ukrainian family's struggle to survive a Government-created famine that killed more than seven million (a quarter of the population) in 1933, the suffering is etched in the stony faces of people too weary and weak to raise their voices."

"In an early scene, the members of an impoverished farming family solemnly take turns dipping their ladles into the single bowl of watery soup that is their only meal of the day. Later in the film, scores of villagers numb with despair and hunger huddle silently in the pouring rain outside a Government office until a truckload of armed soldiers arrives to disperse them. In the most poignant scene, a little boy who has lost his parents calls for his mother as he wonders panic- stricken through a snowy woodland where the trees are outnumbered by crosses marking the dead."

"In the film's grimmest moment, a train stops on the side of a hill, and Russian (Soviet) soldiers unload hundreds of dead bodies from a flatcar, tossing them down a slope and into a burning pit. For every few bodies deposited, a log is rolled to fuel the fire."

"Although the Katrannyks, the family portrayed in "Famine-33" are fictional, the historical events covered by the film are real. In 1932 and '33, Stalin instituted a program in which Soviet troops seized all the livestock, crops and seed stocks grown in Ukraine, the Soviet Union's richest agricultural region, deliberately bringing about mass starvation. One goal of the program was to raise capital for Soviet industrialization by selling the grain abroad. A more insidious goal was to force the independent farmers to work in collectives, where they were patrolled by soldiers, and treated no better than serfs. Integral to the program was the crushing of any notions of Ukrainian independence through the destruction of churches and other cultural institutions."

"Famine-33" which opens today (December 15, 1993) at Film Forum 1 (New York City), relies more on images than on words as it follows the inexorable disintegration of the Katrannyks, a family of six, after Soviet troops invade their house and remove their food supply. Shot mostly in grimy black-and-white, the film occasionally explodes into misty pastel colors for scenes in which the characters hallucinate a time of peace and plenty. The film has a dioramic quality. Instead of following the day-to-day decline of the Katrannyks, it is a series of tableaux of crucial moments in the lives of the family and their neighbors."

"Technically the movie is quite crude. The screenplay written by Serhij Diacheniko and Les Taniuk from Vasyl Barka's novel "The Yellow Prince," is hardly more than a series of spoken captions. There is no conventional character development. Everyone in the fiercely polemical film is an archetype. In those few scenes that require acting, the performances are uneven."

"The Soviet forces that carry out the savagery are portrayed as uniformly monstrous. They take sadistic pleasure in flaunting their grain, vodka and sausages in the faces of the hungry and think nothing of slaughtering hundreds of unarmed protesting farmers with machine guns. When Myron Katrannyk (Georgi Moroziuk), the head of the household, is suspected of hiding a sacred chalice, he is summoned to Communist party headquarters, suspended on a rack and beaten. After he and his wife, Odarka (Halyna Sulyma), refuse to talk, they are held prisoner and their children are left to fend for themselves. One of the perils they face is being kidnapped and eaten."

"Famine-33" is a difficult movie to watch, but it has a stark monumentality. As the camera lingers on the wasted faces and desolate terrain of a land without hope, the film builds up a portrait of suffering and oppression that has universal echoes."

"Famine-33"
Directed by Oles Yanchuk;
written (in Ukrainian with English subtitles) by Sherhij Diachenko and Les Taniuk, based on the novel "The Yellow Prince," by Vasyl Barka;
directors of photography, Vasyl Borodin and Mykhajlo Kretov;
edited by Mykola Kalandjonak and Victor Pacukevych.
At Film Forum 1, 209 Houston Street, South Village (New York City);
time: 95 minutes.
This film is not rated.

Odarka......................................Halyna Sulyma Myron........................................Georgi Moroziuk