MY UNKNOWN SOLDIER (2018)

MY UNKNOWN SOLDIER

Completed project, 2018

Film genre: documentary
Author of the theme, screenplay, director: Anna Kryvenko
Country: Slovakia, Czech republic, Latvia
Producers: Wanda Adamík Hrycová, Michal Kráčmer, Sergei Serpuhov, veronika Kuhrová

The occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968 presented through micro-stories. A Ukrainian student studying in Prague is trying to find her identity together with revealing the identity of a man cut out of family photos – a soldier who committed suicide after returning from Operation Danube.

Behind the film My Unknown Soldier is a repressed family history – specifically the history of the director’s own family. When she visited her family in Ukraine, she discovered photo albums in which one figure was cut out of old photographs with scissors. It took some time to find at least fragments of a story that her family had tried to erase. It is the story of her great-grandfather, one of the soldiers of the Soviet occupation armies who invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968. Her great-grandfather could not bear his guilt and after he had returned home he committed suicide in Ukraine. It could be the story of any of the young soldiers who stood on tanks in August 1968 in Czechoslovakia. From this point of inspiration, the director’s work on the film began to emerge from the perspective of an “occupier,” asking questions about how a human being becomes an occupier in the machinery of war and global power struggles, and what the consequences are for man.

The film received awards at festivals:

  • International Documentary Film Festival ZagrebDox 2019 – Special Mention – International Competition
  • International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film
  • Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival
  • International Documentary Film Festival ZagrebDox
  • International Documentary Film Festival DOK.fest Munich
  • The Special Prize of the Jury – International Competition – IDFF CRONOGRAF, Moldova
  • Special Mention – Prize of Andrej Stankovič, Czech Republic

This film was financially supported by

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