Ukrainian producer Darya Bassel’s Moon Man is presenting Roman Bondarchuk’s The Editorial Office in CineLink’s Works In Progress section at the Sarajevo Film Festival this week.
It is one of several recent films that the prolific producer has been involved in that have travelled to international festivals over the last two years.
Bassel was the Ukrainian co-producer on Danish director Simon Lereng Wilmont’s A House Made Of Splinters which screened in Sundance and went on to secure an Oscar nomination. She was also the producer of Maksym Nakonechnyini’s Butterfly Vision which premiered in Un Certain Regard last year.
Ukrainian voice
Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia, the Kyiv-based Bassel has been one of the most prominent voices within the Ukrainian film industry lobbying for international support for the sector, participating in festival panels and networking with potential financiers and international co-producers. She acknowledges that the last 18 months have been arduous in the extreme.
“The co-producers with whom I have been working, they all understand the situation and they are all good and decent people…very open to creating non-standard contracts and respecting the right of the Ukrainian producer to keep the rights to the project,” she reflects.
“I don’t know what is going to happen in one or two years. I can see that in Ukraine…in terms of the mood and the atmosphere, it is much more depressing. People are getting tired. You are always prepared for the next bomb which can hit your home…[but] it is probably our job, of the Ukrainian film community and of Ukrainian producers and state institutions, to keep this fire - and to keep people aware that the war is not getting better. It is only getting worse.”
The Editorial Office
Currently in late post-production, The Editorial Office was shot in the autumn of 2021 in Kherson, Bondarchuk’s hometown, a few months before the full-scale Russian invasion. Kherson is now a front-line city that has been seriously damaged by Russian bombs and by the severe flooding after the destruction of the Kakhovka dam.
The drama follows a junior researcher at the local nature museum, who stumbles on an act of arson in the forest. He brings evidence of what he has seen to the local newspaper where he is subsequently hired as a journalist - but quickly finds himself adrift in a “post-truth world.”
“At the beginning of the story, he is very naive and believes he has some ideals but then, slowly, when he starts doing this journalistic job, he realises this whole city is covered with this network of corruption. All the politicians are corrupted, all the businessmen are corrupted…it’s an epic, big story which depicts Ukrainian society before the war,” says Bassel, summing up the story.
The Editorial Office was “lucky” in that it received Ukrainian state funding in 2020 - that funding dried up for other films for obvious reasons after the Russian invasion. Nonetheless, its post-production has been fraught.
Bondarchuk - whose featureVolcano premiered at Karlovy Vary in 2018 - left Ukraine with his family, settling first in Romania and then in the UK. The film’s editor, Viktor Onysko, joined the Ukrainian army and was killed on a combat mission at the end of December.
“It was a very big loss for us. He was not only our editor but a very good friend,” Bassel says of Onysko, one of many Ukrainian film professionals to have lost their lives since February last year.
The filmmakers had started editing with Onysko. After he joined the army, they realised that they needed to make alternative plans. They’ve recruited a young Ukrainian editor, Nikon Romanchenko, and have also been working with Toni Erdmann editor Heike Parplies (who also collaborated on Bondarchuk’s earlier fiction film, Volcano, in 2018).
“We are about to start submitting the film to festivals. We are also looking for sales agents,” Bassel says of the film.
New Moon slate
The Editorial Office is just one of several projects that Moon Man is working on. The company is also in late production/early post-production on ambitious feature doc Displaced, directed by Olha Zhurba and co-produced by Danish powerhouse Final Cut For Real and Sweden’s We Have A Plan. Arte France is also on board and a sales agent should be confirmed soon.
Displaced offers a collective portrait of Ukrainians during the war, fleeing or adjusting to life under invasion. “The main idea of the director is to show how traumatic this experience is, the war experience, and to show the scale of this trauma - how it affects not just a single person but the whole nation, millions of people; how it changes the psychology of people. She [the director] is interested in going deep into the phenomenon of people living in war.”
Editing began earlier this summer in Copenhagen with Michael Aaglund, who also edited the Oscar-nominated A House Made Of Splinters which Bassel co-produced. A final “shooting block” is also now underway.
Meanwhile, Bassel is making steady progress with Red Zone, her animated feature being directed by Iryna Tsilyk, whose credits includeThe Earth Is As Blue As An Orange, and which looks at the inner life of women during war. The project won a €20,000 Eurimages development award at CPH:DOX earlier this spring. It has been invited to participate in ANIDOX:LAB, a workshop for animated documentaries. Tsilyk is now at work on the second draft of the script and the filmmakers are recruiting visual artists to work on the film. Moon Man is co-producing with Luxembourg outfit a_BAHN. Bassel is also in talks with potential partners from France, Denmark, Spain and Norway “but nothing is signed yet.”
Moon Man has other projects in the pipeline. Bassel’s colleague Vika Khomenko is developing a new fiction project with director Kateryna Gornostai (with whom she also worked on 2021’s Berlinale selected Stop-Zemlia) and they are participating in the Less Is More development workshop.
Oleksandra Kravchenko - who is attending Sarajevo with The Editorial Office - is working on a new documentary Fixing The War, which Moon Man is co-producing with Ireland’s Plainsong Ltd. This is about “fixers” working with international journalists in Ukraine.
Moon Man is also a minority partner on Oksana Karpovych’s Intercepted, an observational documentary about the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. This includes intimate conversations of Russians soldiers in Ukraine with their loved ones back in Russia, exchanges which have been secretly intercepted and then publicly released by Ukrainian intelligence.
As well as being a prolific producer, Bassel remains head of the industry section at Docudays UA International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival which held its 20th edition at the start of June. “It was the first real-life edition after all the pandemic years and what happened last year with the full-scale invasion. It was super-emotional and a very warm edition,” Bassel says.
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