Behind the Scenes of “Holodomor the Movie”

By Yurij Luhovy

When I first heard a new film about the Famine Genocide was being produced in California, I was really pleased. We definitely need more films about this tragic subject.

A filmmaker friend of mine, Andrij Mazepa referred me to the promo on YouTube on the Internet at:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fODWpc9gE64.

Unfortunately, as I was watching the 9-minute film trailer about the planned Holodomor film, I could not believe what I saw. The California group was using my visual archives in their film trailer, which took me 6 months to research for the multi-award winning film “Harvest of Despair”, released in 1984 by the Ukrainian Canadian Research and Documentation Centre in Toronto (UCRDC).  I quickly wrote to the producer of the promo, Marta Tomkiw, about the plagiarizing of my visual material on April 10, 2008.  This is what I wrote: “I am appalled to see 95% (or more) of the source material of your archival footage just lifted from the award winning documentary Harvest of Despair. This is pirating to the highest degree. The lack of sensitivity of your director (Bobby Leigh) and of your editor with the ‘um-pa-pa’ music just did not make sense in your promo. Also, by mixing the footage of Harvest’s archives just shows me how inaccurate you are and don’t care about the period archival footage. It’s a real ‘mumbo-jumbo’...” She never replied. Instead, I received a letter from Bobby Leigh, the director of “Holodomor the Movie”, April 11, 2008, who stated in his email that “they bought the archives from a collector”, never mentioning the collector’s name. He further added: “We never did pull footage directly from Harvest of Despair”.  This was unbelievable. He surely knows it is illegal for archives to be purchased from or sold to a third party.

Recently, the California team won an award, the Grand Jury Prize - Feature or Short - for most outstanding movie in Monaco. I was pleased for them.

However, I was intrigued and looked at their website: http://www.holodomorthemovie.com/donations.html and saw a different film, this time, their 20-minute version. Perhaps the same as presented in Monaco. Even after alerting them the footage they were using in the 9-minute short version belongs to “Harvest of Despair”, they still used it for the 20-minute version.

I was surprised they did not remove my visual archives used in “Harvest of Despair”, and used 77 still-frame shots as well as 5 shots from the film “Holod 33” by Oles Yanchuk. Together, it represents 50% of their shots. Intrigued, I wrote to Oles Yanchuk in late May and soon after, he confirmed that he never gave permission to Tomkiw to use the [film] footage from his feature, specifically the scene where the bodies are falling into a pit. This raises the question: what else could they have misappropriated as their own?

When Bobby Leigh told me he never lifted any material from “Harvest of Despair”, I carefully reviewed their visual archives by length, fluctuation of luminosity, dust and lint on print, a sure sign that, indeed, it was directly taken from “Harvest of Despair”. Shots were also reframed and some even slowed down 50% to cover up their provenance.

The possibility of finding exactly the same material from 10 different film archives throughout the world, shots that originally come in various lengths, but now cut exactly where I cut them initially in 1983 in “Harvest of Despair”, using four different sequences with shots edited exactly in the same order to the frame, I would say are nil. To do exactly the same “opticals” (special effects) that I made at the National Film Board of Canada and arriving at the same number of frames, are nil again. All this shows their disregard for intellectual property. After 35 years in the motion picture business, it’s a bit harder to fool me, as opposed to the Ukrainian community, unfamiliar with the film making process.

I also cautioned the group about the credibility of the film. As pointed out to Bobby Leigh in my letter of April 14, 2008: “… the Vinnytsia footage shot by the German propaganda machine in 1941 (from Harvest of Despair, showing the coming of the Germans) cannot be interpreted as 1932 famine footage. It’s a question of historical accuracy.”

Despite my offer at that time to help the Tomkiw group correct these errors, they persisted in not making the necessary changes. A large amount of the stock footage, in the 20-minute Internet movie, is from 1918 to 1921 and 1941, inaccurately portraying 1932-1933, since they are mixing one time period with another. For example: Germans in 1918; Polish Marshal Josef Pilsudsky in 1920; Germans marching in Ukraine in 1918; Deniken’s army in 1918; the famous 1941shot of a building falling in Kyiv during World War II; the German army confiscating wheat in 1918; Germans confiscating a cow during the Skoropadskyj regime in 1918. The worst are images [of evidence] from the Vinnytsia massacre of 1937 filmed by the Germans in 1941 and used as if it was 1932-33. This is only the tip of the iceberg!   And further [use of inaccurate film footage as follows]: [evidence of] the Lviv massacre by the Soviets in 1941 filmed by the Germans when they entered the city and portrayed as if it was 1932-1933; civil war footage and burials with coffins passing by, circa 1917-1919; famine footage of 1921 etc…

In addition, four different photos and one document in the Tomkiw montage are also directly lifted from “Harvest of Despair”. This footage could only have been taken from “Harvest of Despair” because Slavko Novytsky and I shot this with a National Film Board camera in Toronto in 1983.  It’s exactly the same footage and camera movement.

Therefore, they should not be showing the 9-minute film trailer promo on YouTube as well as their 20-minute film production of “Holodomor the Movie” on the Internet as currently made. 

With respect to my last email to Bobby Leigh and the rest of the Tomkiw group, on May 29, 2009, inquiring as to whom gave them permission to use “Harvest of Despair” footage - no response has been provided to date.

Yurij Luhovy is one of the producers, archival researcher and editor of [documentary film] “Harvest of Despair”.