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War in Ukraine: The Earth is Blue as an Orange
April 27, 2022 @ 6:00 pm - 8:30 pm
Does art have power during war? Art does have power – it cracks the ice between us; it facilitates the processing of trauma. It gives witness to all that is funny, joyful and faced with laughter in the midst of remarkable darkness.
Single mother Anna and her four children live in the front-line war zone of Donbas, Ukraine. While the outside world is made up of bombings and chaos, the family is managing to keep their home as a safe haven, full of life and full of light. Every member of the family has a passion for cinema, motivating them to shoot a film inspired by their own life during a time of war.
The creative process raises the question of what kind of power the magical world of cinema could have during times of disaster. How to picture war through fiction? For Anna and the children, transforming trauma into a work of art is the ultimate way to stay human.
The film gives us a strong sense of what it is like to live in a war zone and how difficult it can be to leave.
To live between two worlds
As we are writing this text over 10 million Ukrainians have become refugees and more than 3 million have left the country. For the refugees who find safety abroad, the war is in a way over, but on the other hand it’s not. While they themselves are safe, they are still closely connected with people living in the midst of the war. To live ” between two worlds” like this can be traumatic in itself. How are Ukrainians dealing with this and what can be learnt from the experiences of exiled Syrians?
In the talk after the screening we want to focus both on the situation for refugees from an ongoing war, and on the power of documentary films to create empathy for the victims of war, and how films can be an extremely important addition to the news media.
Panel
- Oleksandra Hrybenko (28) is from Donetsk, Ukraine. She is currently working as a PhD Fellow at the Faculty of Journalism and Media Studies at Oslo Metropolitan University researching the safety of women journalists reporting on the conflict in Ukraine. Since the beginning of the Russian invasion in 2014 she has worked as a journalist and field producer for international media reporting on the conflict in Ukraine.
- Osama Shaheen (31) is a journalist for the Norwegian newspaper Bergens Tidende and founder of the Arab language magazine DER. He is a stateless Palestinian and came to Norway from Syria in 2015.
- Moderator: Zeina Bali, Masahat.
In collaboration with Oslo Dokumentarkino, DocuDays Ukraine, The Ukrainian Association in Norway, Human idff, Harbitz Consulting and Vega Scene.