[aaus-list] [Fwd: [announce] Luhovyi on Hollywood Holodomor film]

[Max Pyziur]

Greetings,

My comments in response to the press release appended below.

When first press releases came out in January 2008 regarding the
production of the film cited in the press release, I cautioned one of the
executive producers by writing, " ... be careful with whom you align
yourself. Every national tragedy seems to have a ready cast of amateurs
standing in the wings waiting to make a career out of it. ..."

http://www.ukrainianstudies.org/aaus-list/0801/msg00025.html

Along with a "cast of amateurs," there is an AAUS member aligned themself
as the " ... film’s expert, historian and researcher. ..."

Both in private conversation to AAUS members and, to some degree, in a few
of my aaus-list postings, I've expressed concerned about academic
laziness, bordering on plain dishonesty, and the lack of any serious
review - peer or blind refereed. The laziness, mild or even brazen, can
create (and in this it has) major liabilities not only for them, but also
for the community that they supposedly represent.

Max Pyziur
pyz at brama.com

---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: [announce] Luhovyi on Hollywood Holodomor film
From:    "Orysia Tracz" <orysia.tracz at gmail.com>
Date:    Fri, June 12, 2009 11:44 am
To:      announce at infoukes.com
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

with permission, from Yuriy Luhovy re the Hollywood Holodomor film:


Press Release



*Behind the scenes of “Holodomor the Movie”*

* *

When I first heard a new film about the Famine-Genocide was being produced
in California I was really happy. We definitely need more films about this
tragic subject.



A filmmaker friend of mine, Andrij Mazepa referred me to the promo on You
Tube on the internet at:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fODWpc9gE64.



Unfortunately, as I was watching the 9 min film trailer about the planned
Holodomor film, I could not believe what I saw. The California group was
using my visual archives, in their film trailer, which took me 6 months to
research for the multi-award winning film “Harvest of Despair” released in
1984 by the Ukrainian Canadian Research and Documentation Centre in Toronto
(UCRDC).  I quickly wrote to the producer of the promo, Marta Tomkiw, about
the plagiarizing of my visual material on April 10, 2008.  This is what I
wrote: “I am appalled to see 95% (or more) of the source material of your
archival footage just lifted from the award winning documentary "Harvest of
Despair. This is pirating to the highest degree. The lack of sensitivity of
your director (Bobby Leigh) and of your editor with the umpapa music just
did not make sense in your promo. Also, by mixing the footage of Harvest's
archives just shows me, how inaccurate you are and don't care about the
period archival footage. It's a real mumbo jumbo... “



She never replied. Instead, I received a letter from Bobby Leigh, the
director of “Holodomorthemovie”, April 11, 2008 who stated in his email that
“they bought the archives from a collector”, never mentioning the
collector’s name. He further added: “We never did pull footage directly from
"Harvest of Despair".  This was unbelievable. He surely knows it is illegal
for archives to be purchased from or sold to a third party.



Recently, the California team won an award, the Grand Jury Prize Feature or
Short for most outstanding movie in Monaco. I was pleased for them.

However, I was intrigued and looked at their site:
http://www.holodomorthemovie.com/donations.html and saw a different film,
this time their 20 min version. Perhaps the same as presented in Monaco.
Even after alerting them the footage they were using in the 9 min short
belongs to “Harvest of Despair”, they still used it for the 20 min version.



I was surprised they did not remove my visual archives in “Harvest of
Despair”, and used 77 shots as well as 5 shots from the film “Holod 33” by
Oles Yanchuk. Together, it represents 50% of their shots. Intrigued, I wrote
to Oles Yanchuk in late May and soon after he confirmed that he never gave
permission to Tomkiw to use the footage from his feature specifically the
scene where the bodies are falling into a pit. This raises the question,
what else could they have misappropriated as their own?



When Bobby Leigh told me he never lifted any material from Harvest, I
carefully reviewed their visual archives by length, fluctuation of
luminosity, dust and lint on print, a sure sign that, indeed, it was
directly taken from “Harvest of Despair”. Shots were also reframed and some
even slowed down 50% to cover up their provenance.



The possibility of finding exactly the same material from 10 different film
archives throughout the world, shots that originally come in various
lengths, but now cut exactly where I cut them initially in 1983, in “Harvest
of Despair” using 4 different sequences with shots edited exactly the same
order to the frame, I would say are nil. To do exactly the same opticals
(special effects) I made at the National Film Board of Canada and arriving
at the same number of frames, are nil again. All this shows their disregard
for intellectual property. After 35 years in the motion picture business,
it’s a bit harder to fool me, as opposed to the Ukrainian community,
unfamiliar with the film making process.



I also cautioned the group about credibility of the film. As pointed out to
Bobby Leigh, in my letter of April 14, 2008: “
 the Vinnytsia footage shot
by the German propaganda machine in 1941 (from “Harvest of Despair”, showing
the coming of the Germans) cannot be interpreted as 1932 famine footage.
It's a question of historical accuracy. “



Despite my offer at that time to help the Tomkiw group to correct these
errors, they persisted in not making the necessary changes. A large amount
of the stock footage, in the 20 min Internet movie, is from 1918 to 1921 and
1941 inaccurately portraying 1932-1933 since they are mixing one time period
with another. For example: Germans in 1918; Marshal Josef Pilsudsky, 1920;
Germans marching in 1918 in Ukraine; Deniken's army in 1918; the famous
1941shot of a building falling in Kyiv during the war; the German army
confiscating wheat in 1918; Germans confiscating a cow during the
Skoropadskyj’s regime in 1918. The worst is the images from the Vinnytsia
massacre of 1937 filmed by the Germans in 1941 used as if it was 1932-33.
This is only the tip of the iceberg!   Further: the Lviv massacre by the
Soviets in 1941 filmed by the Germans when they entered the city portrayed
as if it was 1932-1933; civil war footage and burials with coffins passing
by, circa 1917-1919; famine footage of 1921 etc




In addition, 4 different photos and 1 document in the Tomkiw montage are
also directly lifted from “Harvest of Despair”. This footage could only have
been taken from “Harvest of Despair” because Slavko Novytsky, and I shot
this with a National Film Board camera in Toronto in 1983.  It’s exactly the
same footage and camera movement.



Therefore, they should not be showing the 9 min. promo on You Tube as well
as their 20 min production on the Internet as currently made.



To my last email to Bobby Leigh and the rest of the group, May 29, 2009
inquiring as to who gave them permission to use “Harvest of Despair” footage
- no response has been provided to date.



Yurij Luhovy is one of the producers, archival researcher

and editor of “Harvest of Despair”.

-30-



1020 words.



 yurij Luhovy <mmlinc at hotmail.com>
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