Mikhailo Donets

We hear readings from Dovzhenko's diary and hear how the great suffering of the Ukrainian people caused him to move away from beauty for it's own sake to the search for truth, expressed in his two harrowing wartime documentaries. Stalin's 1944 banning of Dovzhenko's Ukraine in Flames screenplay and his subsequent exile to Moscow affected him greatly.

Memory loss is a tragedy for an individual. But what about a nation? How can we measure the tragedy of the Ukrainian people, who were deprived of their historical memory and who, in fact, had no written history of their own?

We hear readings from Dovzhenko's diary and hear how the great suffering of the Ukrainian people caused him to move away from beauty for it's own sake to the search for truth, expressed in his two harrowing wartime documentaries. Stalin's 1944 banning of Dovzhenko's Ukraine in Flames screenplay and his subsequent exile to Moscow affected him greatly.

Memory loss is a tragedy for an individual. But what about a nation? How can we measure the tragedy of the Ukrainian people, who were deprived of their historical memory and who, in fact, had no written history of their own?