Youth Day

documentary movie, HD, 13min24;

in collaboration with Darka Hirna, Serhiy Zhulin, Lena Steinbüchel, Oleksandra Chernova, Bohdan Kutiepov, Serhiy Nazareko;
Ukraine, 2017





« Instead of creating a better future one now creates a better past »

(Boris Buden: Red Velvet, Manifesta Journal#18, 2014)



In the 1970s, a cinema studio was established in the village of Vovchyk, Ukraine. Now, almost 50 years later, the head of the village museum re-discovered some film rolls (one of them entitled “Youth Day”), featuring scenes from the same village back in the USSR. She invites the remaining residents for a film screening. Together, they dive back into the depicted “happy Soviet life“ and re-discover themselves when they were young.

Comprised of the old and new footage, the documentary movie is following the sentimental and very personal reactions of different residents, among them the “Babusenky“ choir, singing traditional native songs. Youth Day is a documentary about personal History, the “good old days“, the post-soviet condition, historical revisionism and the very act of documenting.