«Російський дятел». Українська прем'єра у Санденсі

The cinematographer and star of a new documentary titled “The Russian Woodpecker” had flown in to Park City from Ukraine, where as recently as last week he had been at the country’s eastern battleground of the Donetsk airport, snapping photos while dodging sniper fire from pro-Russia separatists.

Ryzhykov had come to the festival with Fedor Alexandrovich, a wild-eyed Kiev artist who seems to have stepped straight out of a Dostoevsky novel. The pair was unveiling its new documentary, whose cartoonish-sounding title belies its intensity of purpose.

But almost as important as the film’s investigation into that dark chapter is its political message -- that a desperate and militant Vladimir Putin could well wreak havoc in Ukraine and a number of other former Soviet states.

Though a decidedly entertaining effort, overflowing with conspiracy theories and secret cameras, “Woodpecker” also is a deadly dramatic work, a wild tale by way of historical injustice.

“I don’t care about the danger to me,” said Ryzhykov via a translator as he described his recent activities in the war-torn Donbass region of Ukraine. “I care that a country and a people are losing their freedom because of Russian nationalism.”

And so “The Russian Woodpecker,” which debuts at the festival Saturday, had almost overnight become a Sundance rarity -- less another piece in the festival’s broad tapestry of issues that can be gazed upon safely amid fashionable parties and beautiful mountain scenery and more an eerie prophecy, told via a movie screen, of global aggression and suffering.

“As I got further into the movie, it became clear it was extremely serious and timely, because it said something not only about Chernobyl but about what’s happening right now,” said Gracia.

First, the subject of the movie itself. (Hang on, it’s a strange one.)

The woodpecker came at Western channels via the Duga, a massive, otherworldly structure the Soviet Union placed suspiciously right near the Chernobyl reactor outside of Kiev years before it melted down.

The Ukrainian duo’s argument, assembled as they investigate, is that the increasingly apparent failure of the Duga led to officials’ decision to provoke the Chernobyl disaster.

It is an allegation that, if true, would have incendiary consequences, suggesting that one of the worst disasters of the Cold War was caused by a self-protective Kremlin official.

“If true,” though, is a key phrase. Many experts believe Kopchinski placed the call, but they are far from agreed on the reasons for it. The Shamshin theory is considered even further afield, with few scholars subscribing to it. (Much of the documentation from that time is sealed, and other papers are thought falsified.)

But in many ways the truth of the theory is secondary to the story and the political urgency the characters embody — as well as the film’s portrayal of a Russia going to disturbing lengths to protect its interests.

A similar impression is left by the film’s graphic footage, familiar but still compelling, of protesters beaten in Kiev’s Independence Square a year ago by forces loyal to the pro-Russian former leader Viktor Yanukovich. As Alexandrovich says in the film, with his characteristic mix of poetic hyperbole, “The undead Soviet ghoul is pushing us toward World War III.”‎ Like many in Ukraine, he and Ryzhykov see in events like the Ukrainian Revolution and the Chernobyl disaster not discrete tragedies but a continuum of Russia-led aggression and Ukrainian victimization that stretches back hundreds of years.

“I can’t say too much about it, because I still am worried for the safety of me and my family,” Alexandrovich said on Friday.  

But it’s clear there were threats, and he made a choice that, as he said in the interview, “make me the hero and the antihero.” (Gracia later gives Alexandrovich a moment of redemption when the latter is seen standing up in front of huge crowds during the Ukrainian revolution and declaring his theories on Chernobyl, slamming the Russian government, an act that was hugely risky at the time.)

An activist and filmmaker during the revolution that ousted Yanukovich a year ago, he was shot at by pro-Yanukovich police officers, saved only by bullets hitting his camera. Though bleeding badly, he couldn’t go to the hospital because of reports that demonstrators taken there were later being disappeared in forests by pro-Yanukovich forces.

Fears of that kind persist, especially with the film complete. Gracia said that “even though I think Putin has bigger problems right now, this new climate is worrisome, and I certainly wouldn’t feel safe in Russia, or even in a London sushi shop. Things can happen anywhere.”

Ryzhykov, who like Alexandrovich will return to Ukraine after the festival, said he still aims to travel to Russia, where he has family, as well as Donetsk. “I know what can happen to me,” he said. “But I make films and take photos. Am I going to spend my life worrying about a sniper?”

Steven Zeitchik, «Los Angeles Times», 24 січня 2015 року