An interview with Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy, noted down by Tamar Baumgarten-Noort.

You started out as an author of short stories. Are there any similarities between writing a short story and directing a short film?

To be honest: It’s easier to point out the differences. Literature and cinema require substantially different approaches. Both do need a good story as a basis, one that touches me deep inside. But with a short story the process is finished after writing and publishing it – the film process is then only just beginning. The transformation of a story into a film takes so much time that I really need to believe in the story. It has to stay with me on that long road.

What’s attracting you to the short form?

Short film is a special kind of cinema. The only filmmakers who can live happily doing nothing but shorts are animation artists. They don’t need any other format. Everybody else has to face the question sooner or later of when he or she will do a feature length film. But short films are a good way to practise narrative economy: You have to be able to tell a story that could also be enough for two hours in no more than fifteen minutes.

Your film starts in the middle of the action and ends abruptly, too. Did you consider the “before” and “after” when you wrote and directed it?

Yes, we consciously chose a small but very meaningful section from this couple’s life: the moment, when their life turns in a new direction. We wanted to be uninvolved observers and tell the story without judging morally or showing an emotionally tainted attitude towards the characters, be it positive or negative. I myself had a very strong idea of what happens before and afterwards. It is a typical situation for young people. Not everybody becomes a criminal like the young people in my film of course. I mean more the kind of way they are leading their lives.

Did you try to show society’s deficits by invoking topics like HIV, teenage pregnancies and homelessness?

Actually I thought I had made a film about people – not about HIV or other social problems. But after the Berlin Film Festival DIAGNOSIS was shown in Kiev, and at the premiere Ukrainian aids workers came up to me asking me if they could use the film for their educational programme.
I think that a director should make movies that don’t exist yet but which he or she would really like to see. My film is the first of its kind in the Ukraine to at least talk about topics like HIV, and it’s no secret that social criticism is not really approved of in the Ukraine. That’s why we financed the film exclusively via friends and sponsors – there was absolutely no help from the government. I thought that to be extraordinarily destructive. Even more so when you consider that the Ukraine has the highest rate of HIV infections in all of Europe.

Your characters are acting very cruel.

With this I wanted to show how much we all have grown accustomed to violence, how much it has crept into our everyday lives. The characters don’t understand how bad their actions are, maybe they doesn't even realize what they’ve done. Ten years ago I worked as a police reporter, and I can still remember my feelings from that time vividly. In a society without a moral value system it’s not the crimes that are shocking but the unbelievable lack of emotions and the omnipresence of cruelty.

Your characters seem caught up in their helplessness – they just can’t imagine a future for a child. Is the state of the Ukrainian youth really that bad?

Yes, I believe that the helplessness shown in the film is symptomatic for a lot of youths – at least in the social class the characters belong to. But that doesn’t just include Ukrainian youths but those from other eastern European and post-Soviet countries as well.

How political is your film?

My first focus was always on the characters – mostly those I know very well myself. I grew up on the streets of Kiev, so these people are close to me. In the first place this film deals with these kinds of people, their emotions and motivations in life. But there are a lot of them and their actions are the consequence of our government’s ignorant attitude, that doesn’t take care of them. So the film definitely has a political dimension. But at the beginning there is always the human being for me.

Did you already anticipate the look of your film when you wrote the script?

Yes and no. In my mind I had pictures and a certain kind of colour scheme before I began to write. So the artistic concept was already there. My director of photography sent me some pictures from maternity hospitals, where he had done some filming, and then I knew exactly how this film would have to look like. But the story itself has done several twists and turns as I adjusted it to the actors and the locations.

Links

• DIAGNOSIS (UA 2009. Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy)
• A Window to the Home Country – Tamar Baumgarten-Noort about DIAGNOSIS
• Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors – Tamar Baumgarten-Noort about the Ukrainian film market