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<div class="gmail_quote">with permission, from Yuriy Luhovy re the Hollywood Holodomor film: </div>
<div class="gmail_quote"> </div>
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<p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; TEXT-ALIGN: center" align="center"><b><span style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; COLOR: black"><font face="Times New Roman">Behind the scenes of “Holodomor the Movie”</font></span></b></p>
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<p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; COLOR: black"><font face="Times New Roman">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.</font></span></p>
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<p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; COLOR: black"><font face="Times New Roman">A filmmaker friend of mine, Andrij Mazepa referred me to the promo on You Tube on the internet at:<span> </span></font></span><span style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; COLOR: black; FONT-FAMILY: Helvetica"><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fODWpc9gE64" target="_blank"><span style="COLOR: black; FONT-FAMILY: Geneva">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fODWpc9gE64</span></a></span><span style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; COLOR: black"><font face="Times New Roman">. </font></span></p>
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<p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><font face="Times New Roman"><span style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; COLOR: black">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).<span> </span>I quickly wrote to the producer of the promo, Marta Tomkiw, about the plagiarizing of my visual material on April 10, 2008.<span> </span>This is what I wrote: “</span><span style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; COLOR: black">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... “</span></font></p>
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<p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><font face="Times New Roman"><span style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; COLOR: black">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: “</span><span style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; COLOR: black">We never did pull footage directly from "Harvest of Despair".<span> </span>This was unbelievable. He surely knows it is illegal for archives to be purchased from or sold to a third party.</span></font></p>
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<p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 6pt"><font face="Times New Roman"><span style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; COLOR: black">Recently, the California team won an award, the Grand Jury Prize Feature or Short </span><span style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; COLOR: black">for most outstanding movie in </span><span style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; COLOR: black">Monaco. I was pleased for them.</span><span style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; COLOR: black"></span></font></p>
<p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><font face="Times New Roman"><span style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; COLOR: black">However, I was intrigued and looked at their site:</span><span style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; COLOR: black"> </span><span style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; COLOR: black"><a href="http://www.holodomorthemovie.com/donations.html" target="_blank"><span style="COLOR: black">http://www.holodomorthemovie.com/donations.html</span></a> 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. </span></font></p>
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<p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; COLOR: black"><font face="Times New Roman">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?</font></span></p>
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<p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; COLOR: black"><font face="Times New Roman">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.</font></span></p>
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<p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; COLOR: black"><font face="Times New Roman">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.</font></span></p>
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<p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; COLOR: black"><font face="Times New Roman">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. “</font></span></p>
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<p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><font face="Times New Roman"><span style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; COLOR: black">Despite my offer at that time to </span><span style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt">help<span style="COLOR: black"> 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 </span></span><span style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; COLOR: black">mixing one time period with another</span><span style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; COLOR: black">. For example: </span><span style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; COLOR: black">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!<span> </span>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… </span><s><span style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; COLOR: black"></span></s></font></p>
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<p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; COLOR: black"><font face="Times New Roman">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.<span> </span>It’s exactly the same footage and camera movement. </font></span></p>
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<p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; COLOR: black"><font face="Times New Roman">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. <span> </span></font></span></p>
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<p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; COLOR: black"><font face="Times New Roman">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. </font></span></p>
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<p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; COLOR: black"><font face="Times New Roman">Yurij Luhovy is one of the producers, archival researcher </font></span></p>
<p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; COLOR: black"><font face="Times New Roman">and editor of “Harvest of Despair”.</font></span></p>
<p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; TEXT-ALIGN: center" align="center"><span style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; COLOR: black"><font face="Times New Roman">-30-</font></span></p>
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<p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; COLOR: black"><font face="Times New Roman">1020 words.</font></span></p>
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<p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="FONT-SIZE: 13pt; COLOR: rgb(51,51,51); FONT-FAMILY: Tahoma"> yurij Luhovy <<a href="mailto:mmlinc@hotmail.com" target="_blank">mmlinc@hotmail.com</a>></span></p>
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