44th Mostra: The Earth is Blue as an Orange

Living in a war zone definitely makes you improvise, so maybe it is good training for an independent filmmaker. At least making a movie is something to do for single Ukrainian mother Ganna [Anna] Gladka’s family that maybe also holds therapeutic value. As the Russian invaders and their mercenaries shell her Donbass neighborhood, Gladka’s four children record and process the events through the lens of a camera. It is a process documented in turn by Iryna Tsilyk in The World is Blue as an Orange, which screens online for São Paulo film fans as part of the 44^th Mostra festival, following its premiere at this year’s Sundance.

It has long been the dream of Gladka’s eldest daughter Myroslava Trofymchuk to be a professional cinematographer. Her mother admirably supports her, enrolling Trofymchuk in filmmaking camps (like the one where she met Tsilyk) and assisting with film school scholarship applications. One could say she also assumed most of the producer duties on 2014, Trofymchuk’s personal documentary, recording her family’s day-to-day life under wartime conditions.

Trofymchuk’s doc is about as indie as film gets, but she capitalizes on some rather unique opportunities that arise, like passing Ukrainian tank, whose crew agrees to serve as extras in one scene. Yet, the real drama comes when Trofymchuk’s siblings explain how the war has altered their lives and personalities.

Blue as an Orange is a terrible title [a poetic reference], but it is a valuable record of the impact of Russian aggression on average Ukrainians. For those of us who see a lot of documentaries, it also stands a sharp rebuke to Crystal Moselle’s The Wolfpack, in which the filmmaker recorded a film-making family that was entirely home-schooled and forbidden to leave their Lower Eastside apartment, by their controlling father, who is never seen on-camera (making it impossible for viewers to judge his state of mind).