Eurodonbas [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
interview : Korney Gritsyuk
fiche film] has been screened as part of the 32nd Cottbus Film Festival, which unspools from 8-13 November. The documentary by Korney Hrytsyuk tells of the founding of Donetsk and the industrialisation of this region of the country.

Cineuropa: This is your third full-length film, and the second one related to Donbas. Why do you conduct research into the topic of Donbas in so much depth and from a social point of view?
Korney Hrytsyuk: I find it interesting because I come from Donbas myself. I was born in Donetsk and lived there for quite a long time, although I moved to Kyiv before the war, but there is still a lot that connects me personally to this region. Having said that, I haven't been to Donetsk itself since 2014, and I've been to Donbas many times, of course. In fact, the project of Eurodonbas emerged during the making of Train Kyiv-War – when I talked to people, we discussed many Soviet myths, various stereotypes about Donbas and some pro-Russian myths, and then somehow, it became clear that there was a big problem because this territory is very much mythologised, and it is manipulated by the Russian authorities and the state. That's why I became interested in this aspect of the industrialisation of Donbas. I just didn't know much about this topic, but somehow I started to learn more about it little by little, and it turned out that Donbas is not pro-Russian, historically, and not pro-Soviet, but rather a "Euro-Donbas", such is its history and its modernisation. That's why I wanted to make such a light, more popular film – not an auteur film, not a complex film, but one that would be accessible to a wide audience.

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It’s interesting that Belgium, France and Scotland also came to the territory of Donetsk. You can also see a colonialist policy in this.
Scotland was present because the Scots founded Luhansk, the city, but in the film, we have Wales. John James Hughes was Welsh, after all, and he was the founder of Donetsk. Regarding the fact that this is also a colonial story – well, you can actually debate this. This story can probably be taken like that a little bit, but it would be a slightly simplified view of it. These foreigners did not claim these territories; they rented them, they used them, and it was more of a business story, I think. Because it is very different, even if we’re talking specifically about what the Belgians did at that time, for example, in Africa and how much horror they inflicted there, compared with what they did in Donbas. That's why I can't say that this is a colonial story.

But of course, we should also not look at this period through rose-tinted spectacles, but rather talk about the fact that there were also huge social, demographic and xenophobic problems back then, and the environment began to be polluted in Donbas at that time. This period cannot be perceived as totally positive or, on the contrary, as Soviet propaganda, as they still presented it as totally evil – these capitalists who came to fix people, and then the Soviet authorities expelled them. Therefore, it seems that the truth lies somewhere in the middle, and after all, they brought many important things to the place. But at the same time, there were negative aspects of this extremely fast modernisation because it happened in an unnatural way. When, in the span of 20-30 years, in the middle of the steppe, entire cities and huge enterprises appear, this, of course, disrupts the structure of the population, and the region even begins to look different, visually. Therefore, this is a period that needs to be researched in depth because it explains a lot of what happened later in Donbas.

What archives did you use while working on the film?
I would say any archive material we could get our hands on because there are very few archives on this topic in Ukraine. They are somewhere in the territory of the Russian Federation, in their museums, because it was not particularly well preserved here. And what was kept is in such a bad state that it’s very difficult to use – for example, the archives of the Museum of the Donetsk Region, which were evacuated from Donetsk. With these documents, everything is of poor quality, and it is not very clear what year it is in the photos. And that's why we used whatever we could from the Ukrainian archives, which was understandable, but the biggest share was from the archives of Great Britain, which we found, because we had consultants for this film there who researched the topic. We were also sent German archive material of the Mennonite communities from Belgium, from the company Salve, which still exists, because the Mennonites were very strongly represented in Donbas. Then we were lucky enough to find a huge archive in Mariupol, which may sound strange, at a company called Metinvest. There were some good archives there specifically about the history of Mariupol in the 19th and 20th centuries. So we got a lot of high-quality photos from there as well and inserted them into the film. But in addition to visual materials, we made use of various documents from those times, like correspondence from these foreigners, when they wrote home from Donbas.